


Sweet

by AlternateAims43



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Eventual Smut, Everyone Is Alive, Explicit Language, Ice Cream, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Slow Build, Some angst, Underage Drinking, after school jobs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2017-07-08
Packaged: 2018-03-13 03:46:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 33,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3366563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlternateAims43/pseuds/AlternateAims43
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean Kirschtien and Eren Jaeger have the worst job in the world. It’s too bad the ancient jukebox is broken, and too bad about the uniforms, and too bad they both desperately need the money. Jean doesn’t know or care what Jaeger is planning to do with his minimum wage savings. All he cares about is someday being able to pay for a good education somewhere relatively far away. Somewhere that will set him on the path to an untroubled, comfortable life. Then the bell over the door rings one lonely Tuesday night, and in walks a miracle. A confusing blond miracle, who likes strawberry milkshakes and wants to talk to Jaeger. Sometimes life is bitter, and sometimes its sweet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Cow

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I really wanted to contribute something to this fandom, even though I have literally never done anything like this before (please be kind). In any case, I give you a high school AU where Jean and Eren have after school jobs at the same ice cream parlor, which goes about as well as you’d imagine. Expect awkward moments, bad parties, first times, spontaneous road trips, whipped cream, and lots of cows.
> 
> *Hi again!* Sorry about the endless hiatus this fic recently came off of. It went on for so long partly because I've been unreasonably busy, but mostly because I wasn't completely happy with the story I'd already written. That said, there have been a few changes to the originally posted fic, as well as new chapters. It's nothing drastic, but there is a new scene, and if you're continuing to read this fic, it might be worth it to go back and have a skim. Thanks to everyone for reading!
> 
> HELLO AGAIN, just a quick note to say that after the events of chapter 82, I've decided to pick up where I left off with this fic. I hope at least a few of you are still interested in reading! Let's all try and stay strong in this dark time. I'll do my part by continuing to bring you ice cream and high school crushes to numb the pain of canon.

The air was thick and sweet, heavy with the scent of cream and cold and scattered rainbow sprinkles.

“Hi, what can I get you?” I said, scooper poised over fifteen different kinds of ice cream and sorbet.

“Uh, I’ll just have a vanilla milkshake. You guys do those right?”

I stepped back and looked hard at the girl standing on the other side of the counter. She had short red hair tied into pigtails, and looked overly cheerful. I wondered if she could read the ‘ _please murder me_ ’ in my eyes. As it transpired, she could not.

“Eren!” I shouted over my shoulder. “We need a milkshake. Vanilla.”

The boy currently wiping down the sink froze, green eyes widening. He shook his head fiercely.

“No way. I made the last one.” Fuck, he definitely did. I recovered quickly.

“So? I made two in a row yesterday while you were on break.”

“And I’m supposed to believe that?” Eren said, his voice rising. I spared a glance for the customer, whose grin had transformed into raised eyebrows and a visible amount of apprehension.

“You’d better, or I’ll tell Mike it was you who forgot to put up the wet floor sign last week.” Eren paled, his face now fitting in nicely alongside the pastel walls.

“Fine. But I’m not making a third. I’m not suicidal, you absolute bastard.”

I turned back to the customer, ignoring Eren’s continued angry muttering as he picked up the plug to the blender and brought it slowly towards the faulty socket, already half wincing. If today was the day he finally got electrocuted, I had no desire to witness it, even if it would probably be hilarious.

~

It had been one hellish month.

One hellish month since I started working at the ice cream parlor at the very end of Main Street, _if_ you could call it a parlor. The Sweet Frozen Cow was tiny, three tables and six chairs crammed in-between the counter and an ancient broke down jukebox that played the 1969 hit Sugar Sugar on an infinite loop. The blender did its best to explode every time we plugged it in, and the uniforms…lets just say I thought about setting myself on fire at least twice per day. Run down as it seemed, the place was admittedly something of an institution in town, and did fairly steady business.

My employment at The Cow -as nearly everyone referred to it- was supposed to be extremely temporary. _Just until I find something better_ , I told myself upon circling the help wanted ad in bright pink. I had been sure I would soon move up in the world; that this was simply basic training, something I could use to measure myself before I went on to bigger and better things. No one, not Sasha and her intuition, or ‘Old Smell it Out Mike’, or the all-knowing Levi Ackerman, could have predicted the shitstorm I was stepping into.

I might have found the whole thing bearable, were I not stuck working with such a sorry excuse for a functioning human being. I remembered in vivid detail, walking through the front door on my first day and seeing Eren Fucking Jaeger already standing behind the counter.

The California sunshine turned suddenly icy.

We had stared at each other in suspended disbelief, startled into reality by a man in a purple manager’s shirt bursting out of the back room, wearing a wide grin and pointing at me.

“I thought I smelled our second new employee! Do you two know each other? I’m sure I noticed you both attend St. Maria’s.”

Eren and I had hated each other pretty much on principle since we first met, on the very first day of freshman year. Whatever Mike was expecting to hear, it probably wasn’t “ _I’m not working with him!_ ” as both of us proceeded to shout.

The looks we were giving each other could have melted all the ice cream in the place, but Mike clearly wasn’t fooling around. His face, which had gone from pleased to shocked in a matter of seconds, now fell into a stern line that seemed out of place silhouetted against an advertisement for rainbow unicorn ice cream cake. He pointed his finger between us.

“Hey now, I won’t tolerate any arguments when there are customers around, and I expect the place to run in perfect working order when I’m not here. You’ll be up against ravenous citizens, and I can tell you from experience that it’s a task that calls for teamwork. Do you two want the jobs or not?”

And boy did I want the cash.

~

Two more customers came into the shop just then. They were a pair of older women, and began to giggle as they reached the counter.

“Hi, what can I get you?” I asked.

“Oh,” said one, smiling widely at me while her friend continued to laugh, “your outfit is just so darn cute.”

I stepped back hastily, just in case she tried to prod the big fake cowbell slung around my neck. My cow ears slipped as I did so, and I readjusted them, gritting my teeth.

“Thank you.” I tried to smile, but probably ended up looking more like a gremlin after midnight, judging by a lack of further comments on my uniform. To my great relief, they both wanted single scoops of raspberry lemon sherbert, and I served them as Eren rang up the girl whose milkshake he had just risked his life to make.

Once both parties were gone, we began the process of locking up, both of us more than eager to leave. It was still almost a full hour before we officially closed, but barely anyone came in that late, and it took time to sweep the floors, mop up, and wash everything down. I dried a handful of ice cream scoopers hurriedly, mind wandering. I was in the middle of considering how unfairly hot Eren’s sister was when he appeared in the kitchen, making me jump.

“You done?” He asked. “I’ve got homework to finish.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “Hold on.”

I put the scoopers on the drying rack and grabbed the keys to the store from their hook on the wall. We kept it civil as we locked up. When it got this late, after so many hours spent counting change and dusting sprinkles, neither of us could muster up the energy to be aggressive. We even managed a tired and simultaneous ‘see you’ as Eren climbed into the driver’s seat of his recently acquired secondhand pickup, and I got on my bike.

If Eren and I were friends, he could probably drive me home. This would be a definite plus, probably one of many in such a specific alternate universe. Imagining Jaeger and I as buddies made me feel slightly ill. I resigned myself to the fact that there would probably never be any real upside to being coworkers, and began the lonely ten-block journey home.

~ 

I ignored my alarm three times the next morning, hiding underneath the covers from the weak sunshine streaming through my blinds. I had been up till midnight trying to finish my homework, and school was a less than welcome prospect. When I finally made it out the door and found the Southern California air surprisingly chilly, I almost turned right back around. Still, at least I only had one class with Jaeger. No trace of him in first period biology, as the only person I actually wanted to see at the moment walked through the door. Thin black hair and a stupid number of freckles came to a halt right beside me.

“Good morning!” Said Marco, making the floor rattle as he dropped his backpack and kicked it under his desk.

“Fucking is it?”

“How was work?” He asked, ignoring my less than ecstatic tone as he pulled out pen and paper.

“Shit as usual.”

“Great!”

“It’s not funny dude.” I said, throwing an eraser at Marco’s head. “I have the night shift again today, I have to close up again and everything. Please promise you’ll stop by, I can’t spend another solid four hours with no one but Jaeger to talk to.”

“I’ll do my best.” Said Marco. “No promises though. I’ve got to babysit and I don’t know how long that’ll take.”

I made a noise somewhere between a groan and stubbing a toe.

“He’s not that bad.” A voice issued from just behind Marco. Sasha continued to doodle on her notebook as she spoke. “I don’t get how you two can spend so much time together and still whine _so much_ about it. Are you sure it isn’t just misdirected sexual attraction?”

From either side of her, Connie and Reiner burst into laughter as I spluttered.

“You’re going to pay for that one,” I said. “I don’t know how, but I swear to god, someday…if you ever suggest I have sexual feelings for Jaeger again-“

Dr. Shadis entered the room, and my threat died in my throat. I tilted my head towards Marco instead.

“Get your ass to The Cow tonight or I’ll saw you in half with my ruler.” I said under my breath. “Right down the middle, Marco, I swear I will.” I felt the eraser I had thrown a minute ago bounce off the side of my head

“Ow! What was that for?”

“Don’t make jokes Jean.”

~

I ignored Jaeger in Algebra as usual that afternoon and went directly home after final bell, wheeling my bike into the garage and falling into a heap on my twin bed, exhausted. Mom wasn’t home yet, which meant she couldn’t nag me about school stuff, and therefore it didn’t exist. There was math homework sitting in my backpack, but I already knew there was no chance of it getting done, so I only felt twenty percent guilty about spending the next two hours playing videogames and drinking half a gallon of orange juice. All the while the clock on the wall acted as a magnet, drawing my reluctant eyes back again and again. Half an hour till my shift. Twenty-five minutes. Fifteen minutes. At 4:48 my mom arrived home shouting at me to get going, and finally there was nothing left for it. I got up and changed into clothes that didn’t smell like school, ran a hand through my hair and retrieved my bike from the garage, saying a hasty goodbye over my shoulder. It felt as though absolutely no time had passed, and I pulled up in front of The Cow at 5:01, already annoyed.

Eren was already there when I trudged into the back room without a greeting and came out wearing our idiotic uniform, cow ears and all. I wondered for the millionth time why he was even here. Eren _had_ a job, and a good one at that, spending his weekends stocking the shelves of the sporting goods store downtown. I didn’t know much about Jaeger’s home life, but I was pretty sure his dad was some kind of doctor. Why did he need two jobs? How did he manage to keep either of them with his temper? Why did any of this matter?

I decided it didn’t and simply leaned against the counter, pretending I was the only person in the room as I began to reorganize our array of different colored sprinkes.

“It’s going to be empty tonight.” Eren said, breaking a twenty-minute silence.

“Who says?”

Eren shrugged.

“It was pretty cold today. Less people are going to want ice cream when it’s cold.”

“Genius level logic.” I said.

“Just saying,” said Eren. “wouldn’t be surprised if we end up dead tonight.”

An hour later, his prediction was proving to be spot on. We hadn’t had a single customer. Not that Tuesday evenings were ever particularly busy, but there was usually at least one kid being treated to birthday ice cream, one couple wanting something sweet after dinner.

I grew hopeful when the door jingled at half past six, but it was just Mike making a surprise visit.

“Mike, can we close up early?” I asked, the second I saw it was him stepping over the threshold.

“Absolutely not. You two have got to perform your jobs to the best of your ability. This team depends on it.”

‘Team’ was clearly Mike’s way of saying: himself, me, Eren, and our co-manager, Hanji.

“There’s no one here, Mike!” Eren said. “Literally no one here. We’re going out of our minds!”

But Mike wouldn’t budge an inch, and left after checking the fridge temps, and stealing a sample spoon of Caramel Cluster Cravings.

At just after seven pm there was still no sign of a customer, or my best friend (currently utterly failing at required best friend duties), and the oppressive silence was pushing me slowly past boredom and into a watery depression. I’d reorganized the sprinkles three times, stacked almost every ice cream cup we owned into a massive pyramid, and drawn a detailed picture of a cow on the whiteboard that displayed the flavor of the week. I thought I might pick up a conversation with the wall if I didn’t talk to someone soon, even if that someone was Eren.

“We don’t get paid enough for this.” I said under my breath, half hoping he wouldn’t hear me. He did.

“We’re not even doing anything. You think we don’t get paid enough to do nothing?” Eren said. “Wouldn’t have thought you’d complain about easy cash. You’re all about smooth sailing.”

Nothing he’d said was directly insulting, which did absolutely nothing to stop me from being insulted.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

“Exactly what I said.” said Eren, an edge to his voice. He had on the same angry face I disliked so much, all hard lines and righteousness. Horribly, Sasha’s earlier comment on latent sexual attraction popped into my head. I was really going to kill her.

“What’s so wrong with smooth sailing?” I said, scowling as I fixed my cow ears. “Why make life more difficult for yourself? Anyone who says they prefer a struggle is either lying or stupid or both.”

“Jean?” Said Eren.

“What.”

“You’re an idiot.”

He stepped quickly out of the way as I aimed a kick at his shins. Then he was sliding over the counter, headed towards the door.

“Where do you think you’re going?” I asked.

“I want a slushie,” he said, nodding in the direction of the convenience store across the road.

“You can’t leave! You’re break’s not for another half an hour.”

Eren rolled his eyes at me.

“Relax, I’ll be right back.”

And then I was alone, with only the ice cream to keep me company, and the overly happy store decorations to fuel my rage.

I didn’t see how Jaeger had any right to call me an idiot. My paychecks were going straight to college savings. There was nothing wrong with wanting a good education, a well paying job, and an early retirement, and I refused point blank to let Jaeger convince me otherwise.

I was still pissed off when the bell over the door rang, so pissed off I didn’t immediately register that there was someone standing at the counter. There was a small cough, and I gave a start as I looked up.

“Hi, what can I get you?” I said instinctively. 

There was a boy standing in front of me, face framed by soft yellow hair that fell just past his chin. His overlarge sweatshirt matched his pale blue eyes, which were wide and bright.

He didn’t say anything, and I found myself unnerved.

Though he stood about five inches shorter than myself, the look he was giving me suggested he might be here to rob the place. Instead of giving me an order, he asked a question.

“Is Eren here?”


	2. The Apology

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am soooo sorry for the amount of time it took to get the second chapter up. Please forgive a tired University student. Also apologies for any typos in the text. I've read it over a hundred times but I'm sure there are still plenty.  
> Lastly, please note that I know its March, but Halloween is my favorite holiday and I would totally pay an unreasonable amount of money for any novelty drink an ice cream parlor could think up.
> 
> *If you've previously read this fic, I basically gave this chapter extra content, which is why what was previously chapter two is now split into chapters two and three. I promise that from now on all content will remain untampered with:')

 

“Is Eren here?”

I blinked and opened my mouth but no words came out. Why were no words coming out?

Maybe it was because there was no way this guy had business with Jaeger. Despite the deeply unsettling way he was staring me down, I got the feeling he was one of those people that apologized to office appliances and stopped to let birds cross the street. The sheer implausibility of it all was demanding a pause in reality that just wasn’t going to happen.

Yes, I was thrown.

“Is Eren here?” He repeated. “You know, Eren Jaeger?”

“What?” I said. How was it possible for someone to look intimidating and like they belonged in a commercial for fabric softener at the same time? Was that a really weird thing to think?

“Is Eren Jaeger here? He told me to drop by.” He said this slowly enough that I knew he must think I was seriously challenged.

_Get it together, Jean._

“Eren’s on break. Sort of.” I said.

“Right,” he said, “thanks, uh…Jean.”

So he was the type of person who bothered to read nametags. As a general rule, I found this 15% nice and 75% off putting.

“No problem.” I said. “He’s across the street actually, if you want to talk to him. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“I’ll just wait here,” the boy said, plopping himself down in one of our little spindly chairs. I nodded; still not completely convinced he could be here to see Eren. I narrowed my eyes at him.

What did you say your name was?”

“Oh, its Armin.” He said. He fit in rather nicely with the interior of the Sweet Frozen Cow, all soft lines and bright lighting. I watched as he did a quick scan of the ice cream flavors, filling the weird silence I had created. His eyes lingered on strawberry dream while I struggled to find something to say.

“Pretty name.”

My face went immediately red as I said it, and Armin’s gaze snapped up to meet mine. What in god’s name had possessed me to say that? In my defense, it _was_ a pretty name. This kid was a pretty person. That wasn’t even weird to think, it was just a fact. _Oh god why_. Before I could apologize or kill myself with my own ice cream scoop, the bell rang again, and the front door was slammed open.

“Armin! You made it!” The name that had sounded so pleasant a moment ago ricocheted off the walls and around the room. Eren was back, big gulp in hand; his lips already stained pale blue. He approached Armin’s table, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “Thank god you’re here. I was about to pull a murder suicide with only sea biscuit here for company.”

“Fuck off Jaeger!”

I looked quickly back at Armin, who was suppressing a laugh by turning it into a cough, and suddenly found myself deeply annoyed. Already laughing at Eren’s horse jokes? I might be able to believe they were friends after all. Scowling, I stepped back from the counter and folded my arms.

“You know I didn’t show up today to play hostess to your friends. And who gave you permission to invite guests anyway; we’re supposed to be working,” I said, pretending I hadn’t done the exact same thing.

“Jesus, cut me some slack; we haven’t had a single customer. How many more times can you possibly rearrange the sprinkle cans? Besides, you know Armin.” Eren shot back.

I had spent most of Eren’s sentence preparing a retort and several insults. As he finished however, they turned to air on my tongue.

_I knew Armin? Was this a joke?_

“I—“

I glanced at him, and saw that he was taking his turn blushing, the very tips of his ears going a pink that perfectly matched the strawberry dream flavor he had been eyeing earlier.

“I’m in your Algebra class.” He said in a would-be casual voice, looking anywhere but at me.

My first thought was, _how is that possible_? Closely followed by: _shit_.

“Of course you are.” I said, trying pointlessly to cover for myself. I had already asked him what his name was. Maybe they were playing a joke on me. Was I that obtuse in Algebra? The answer was yes.

“This is the third year I’ve been in your Algebra class.”

_Fuck._

I felt bad, but before I could even begin to think of something to say, Eren spoke. 

“Don’t worry, Arm,” he said, glaring at me, “Jean’s vision is limited. Horses can’t see anything that’s put directly in front of them.”

Armin clapped his hand to his mouth, but not fast enough to stifle what could only be described as a giggle.

Well, if he was going to laugh at something as stupid as Jaegers comments about my (perfectly normal length thank you very much) face, there was no point feeling sorry for him. No wonder I never noticed him; he was just another Jaeger duplicate. God knows one was enough.

“My turn to go on break.” I said, heading for the door and shooting both of them my darkest look.

I walked to the same convenience store Eren had just returned from, and bought a bottle of coke and a Twix. I ate them there, pacing back and forth along the chip aisle and hoping a meteor or a satellite or something would strike The Cow while I was gone. When I finally got back, I ignored the pair of them, which wasn’t hard considering the extent to which they were ignoring me, talking and laughing while I whiled away the remainder of my shift counting ceiling tiles like the world’s biggest loser. When nine pm finally rolled around, I gathered my stuff and walked out the door without so much as a word of farewell, leaving Eren with the responsibility of locking up.

It had been a pretty shit day, and I peddled home cursing my bike, cursing The Cow, cursing Eren Jaeger, and cursing his weird friend for good measure. Who did he think he was waltzing into my place of work and insulting me?

Marco called almost as soon as I got home.

“You let me down man,” I said as I picked up the phone. I told him everything, only leaving my bizarre ‘pretty name’ comment. Ten minutes later Marco finally got a word in.

“Sorry, I got super tied up.” He said, after I had ended my tirade. “I can’t believe you don’t know Armin. He’s always around. I mean sure he’s kind of quiet, but...”

“I don’t know,” I said, “it was just super fucked up. I don’t want to apologize. Why should I?”

I could tell Marco was shrugging, even over the phone.

“I can’t tell you what to do. Armin isn’t a bad guy though. He’s actually-“

“Marco.” I cut him off. “I really don’t want to hear it right now.”

“You sure you’re okay Jean? You sound kind of weird.” Said Marco.

The truth was I felt weird. I felt really weird, and had absolutely zero clue why. Something about meeting Armin had unnerved me.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, trying to push the feeling down and out, “seriously, I’m fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

~

I paid careful attention in Algebra the next day, as the teacher called roll. I didn’t have to wait long. The third name she called was followed by a quiet ‘present’ from the desk next to Eren’s. Same blond hair, same blue eyes.

 _Arlert_ , I repeated in my head. _Huh_.

There were several possible explanations for not recognizing Armin. It might have been because he sat at the back, or because this particular teacher only ever used our last names, or possibly because I had always found myself too distracted by a deep hatred for Eren Jaeger. Either way, I couldn’t get what Marco had said about Armin being a decent guy out of my head. He sat unbelievably placid for the rest of the lesson, paying careful attention to the board, barely moving anything but his hand, to take notes or else brush his bangs aside. By the time class was over I had resigned myself to the fact that Armin probably deserved an apology after all. Even Sasha and Connie made the occasional horse joke, and I didn’t hate them, most of the time. Probably only like, 37% of the time. They weren’t bad numbers.

I knew I had to get Armin alone. There was no way in hell I was apologizing in front of Jaeger, for reason’s I was fully aware had everything to do with my warped pride. However, getting Armin alone was not easy, despite the fact that since acknowledging his existence, he seemed to be everywhere I looked. If he wasn’t glued to Eren’s side, he was talking with Mikasa, or walking between the two of them. I’d even seen him lounging by the stairs with Connie and Reiner a few times, which while Marco insisted was quite normal, I found shocking. Marco suggested that Armin was much too gentle and soft-spoken to have ever appeared on my radar, which only picked up things as loud and stupid as I was. I suggested he prepare for an early grave. A few times I thought I had him, but it was only Historia, who had hair exactly his color. I theorized this could be another reason I had not acknowledged his existence. It wouldn’t be hard to mistake him for a girl, he was so delicate looking. Secretly, I knew this was a shit theory.

 Finally, a few days after our initial meeting, I managed to corner Armin. I was really glad, because trying to catch him alone was quickly becoming something approaching stalking levels of dedication. I’d figured out a few of his classes, and had taken to staring out the window in the door in case he walked past History from Biology on his way to the bathroom. It was this strategy that led me to excuse myself from a lesson on ancient Rome, jogging down the hall until I found him bent over the water fountain.

            “Hey.” I said.

“Oh, hi.” He said as he turned around and saw me. The look that came over his face clearly wondered why I was speaking to him. Or how I had managed to find him during a two second break from class. Probably both. _I’m not a stalker_ , I told myself. I had just opened my mouth to apologize when he cut me off.

“Um,” he said in a rush, “I’m sorry about the other night. Eren made me come in to keep him company, he texted me about a billion times. I know I shouldn’t have been just hanging out when you guys were working.”

I had not expected this.

“What? No, look, I’m the one apologizing here.” I said, maybe a bit to loudly. “That is, _I’m_ sorry about the other night. I was kind of shit. You seem not horrible; well, Marco keeps telling me you’re nice; I figure I never noticed you around probably because of Jaeger and I… and…uh…”

This was 1000x more awkward than I thought it would be. Armin must really be as nice as Marco said, because he chose the next second to put me out of my misery.

“It’s fine.” He said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Great.” I said. “And to be honest, its fine if you come by the cow while Eren and I are there. We’re never that busy, and our managers are like, never there. Oh, I’m also uh, sorry if I freaked you out.”

“What?” Said Armin.

“Your name. I told you it was pretty. That’s not something guys usually tell each other is it?” I don’t know exactly what kind of asshole I sounded like, but I knew it was a big one.

“It didn’t freak me out.” He said, and his ears turned suddenly red again, the same way they had when he’d had to tell me we went to school together. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean. In any case I could feel myself about to match Armin with my own deep blush.

“Good, good. I was just really tired, you know. It’s not even like that.” I tacked on for good measure.

“Okay,” said Armin. He looked nervous, like he couldn’t wait to get away. “I should go. I have French next, and there’s a test today.”

“Right right. See you then.”

Armin nodded and walked away. I watched him go, feeling 25% good about making things right, and 75% like I should find him again tomorrow to apologize for my apology. _What is wrong with me?_

It seemed I hadn’t completely scared him off however, because while he neither looked at nor spoke to me, Armin returned to the Cow. In fact, he was there almost every evening Eren and I worked for next week. He always sat at the table in the corner, out of the way but close enough to the counter that he could talk to Eren. Sometimes he brought homework, and sometimes he just stopped by to say hello. Either way, he was _there._ It was just like school. I had gone more than two years not knowing he existed and now I couldn’t turn around without finding him there. Even though I had told him it was okay, it was starting to get frustrating for reasons I couldn’t explain, especially when he and Eren really got to talking.   

I didn’t try to listen in. That would have been creepy and altogether below me. Still, Eren was so loud sometimes that it was hard not to hear what they were talking about. Slowly, I picked up a few things.

Armin was smart. Like, scary smart. He knew a lot about earth science, rocks and water and all that. He lived with his grandfather, and had his learning permit but didn’t see the point of going for his license since he didn’t have a car. He loved strawberry milkshakes but Eren refused to make him one on account of our death trap of a blender. He was weird, but not in a bad way. He was the kind of weird that made you kind of jealous.

I honestly didn’t know why I was paying any attention at all. Maybe it was because it just didn’t add up; him and Eren being friends.  Normally I wouldn’t let something that didn’t actually involve me bother me, but it did. Every day I came in and saw him sitting there, every day he was laughing with Eren, every day he took notes quietly in Algebra. The universe had been somehow off balance since the first day he showed up in the Cow. Yes, something was wrong. Something was very wrong, and it was a thorn in my side that for whatever reason, I couldn’t seem to ignore or get rid of.

Two weeks after Armin had first appeared in The Cow, I found myself glaring at my lunch. Sasha and Connie were chatting happily together to my right, and so strange was their conversation (something about how far you would have to run to die of exhaustion) that I barely noticed Marco staring at me, eyebrows knit.

“Dude, “ he said, snapping me out of my daze, “you ok?”

“Of course.” I said, probably too loudly. Marco nodded.

“Sure. Do you want to do something this weekend? Have a night in and play stupid video games? I’ll bring the MP’s.”

MP was our favorite brand of madness inducing soft drink. It was branded as half soda, half energy boost, and I was pretty sure it was illegal.

“That sounds great actually.” I took a soulless bite of equally soulless macaroni and cheese, not tasting anything.

“Really though,” said Marco, “you look like you could kill a man. Is it work?”

“It’s always work.” I said. And then, because there was no point in pretending otherwise, I did my best to explain my issue as casually as possible, without sounding like I had rage problems.

“…and he’s always in there talking to Eren about some science project or something, it’s annoying.” I said. “Isn’t there any other time they could hang out? I don’t know, it just…I don’t like it.” Marco was grinning at me, and I wasn’t happy about it. “What?”

More grinning.

“You think he’s cute, don’t you?”

I nearly choked on my macaroni and cheese. Sasha had to thump me on the back six times before I finally got my breath back.

“What? That has absolutely nothing to do with, like, anything! Fuck, stop smiling at me like that!” It didn’t help that I apparently couldn’t form coherent sentences now. Marco didn’t stop.

“What’s wrong with him exactly? He’s friends with someone you’ve hated for years? He was too nice about all your assery?”

“I don’t know what it is. He bothers me. And actually, yes, his friendship with Eren gains him zero points.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. Armin is genuinely nice.”

“Just forget it.” I said dully.

Marco stood, adjusting his bag on his shoulder.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “Don’t forget about this weekend. Video games, pizza, and MP.”

“I hate you.”

“You love me!” Marco called over his shoulder as he began to walk away.

I couldn’t believe he had pulled the ‘you think he’s cute don’t you’ card. As if we were living in some kitschy romantic comedy. Far from it.  

 


	3. The Franken-Slime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter stayed the same! No more changes!

In reality, I was looking forward to Saturday. Some down time with Marco was exactly what I needed. A chance to clear my head. No Jaeger. No cow uniform.

Unfortunately, that afternoon brought the worst news I could possibly imagine.

“A Halloween special?” Repeated Eren. We were standing in our tiny break room, cornered by Mike.

“Wait,” I said, recognizing a much larger problem than having to make a no doubt idiotically named Halloween dessert. “Did you say drink? A new Halloween drink?”

“That’s right!” said Mike, beaming. “The Franken-slime! Hanji invented it. I recon it’ll be a hit with the kids. With Halloween right around the corner, we need _something_ to draw in a crowd.”

“Mike,” said Eren, “our blender blows up every time we plug it in. The socket is faulty, and I’m not sure how many more times we can risk it before something goes wrong. We’re going to die.”

I found myself nodding vigorously in agreement, for once one hundred percent on Eren’s side.

Mike sighed and shook his head.

“Listen, this place is desperately low on money as it is. If you two can find some way to raise the cash to rewire the place, be my guest. Otherwise, you’ll make do with the blender and socket that we have.”

Not for the first time, I considered that Mike might be categorically insane. Had I known just how life threatening this job would turn out to be, I definitely wouldn’t have taken it. Surely this counted as child abuse, or violated some kind of labor law.

But boy, did we need the money.

 

We started advertising the Franken-slime that day. To both of our horrors, one of Mike and Hanji’s crowd drawing strategies actually seemed to be working. No less than thirty people came in and ordered the Halloween special, meaning my fingertips were singed by the time I got home that evening. I thought this was the worst it could possibly get, until Friday, when the blender started to scream.

“What’s happening!?” Eren shouted, backing quickly away from our demon spawn of a kitchen appliance. He pulled the cord with a yelp, and the metallic whine stopped. It began again as soon as we plugged it back in, lasting a full thirty seconds before the blades became jammed. We looked at each other.

“Fuck.”

I tried everything I could think of, knowing any second a new wave of customers would come in demanding horror themed beverages. Unfortunately, everything I could think of was pretty much banging it against the ground and shaking it as hard as I could manage. Eren’s methods were similar, but with more yelling. Ten people came in asking for the Franken-slime, and then left when we told them it was no longer available.

Eventually there was nothing left but to prop it back up and stare at it, as if we would suddenly gain the power to control electronics.

As we stood there facing the blender, the bell above the door rang, and I turned to see Armin strolling towards us, a bag slung over his shoulder, his hair pulled into a loose ponytail.

_Great._

“Sorry,” I said, cutting off Eren who had just opened his mouth to speak. “But Eren doesn’t have time today. The blender’s gone to shit and we’ve already had about fifty people asking for the new Halloween Drink, so,” I glanced towards the door.

“Jean, you idiot.” Said Eren, whacking me on the side of the head. “Armin’s here to fix the blender.”

“What?” I said, completely caught off guard.

“Armin’s going to fix the blender for us.” Eren repeated, slowly. “He’s smart with that kind of stuff.”

I looked at Armin.

“Seriously?” I said. He shrugged in response.

“I’m going to try.”

“I— thanks.”

He gave me a shy smile and I felt I had never met anyone I associated less with Eren Jaeger.

“Well,” he said, shaking the bag he had brought to it clanged, “I’ll see what I can do. You guys stall.”

“How?” Said Eren. Armin paused, obviously thinking.

“Well…”

~

Armin sat on the floor surrounded by his tools while Eren and I found ways around the temporary indisposition of our blender. We switched off taking care of regular orders and appeasing those in search of the Franken-slime. In these cases, we invented alternatives that grew wilder as the night went on. We stuck upside down cones on scoops of mint chip, and constructed vanilla, orange dream, and lemon sherbet monstrosities. Both the ‘Wicked Taste of the West’ and the ‘Ice Corn Calamity’ turned out to be rather popular. It was one of those rare instances in which I was able to recognize that Eren and I actually made a decent team, when the situation was dire. I tried to pretend those instances didn’t happen, for the most part.

In between customers, I stopped to watch Armin working. He had taken the blender almost completely apart, working with tiny screws and equally small screwdrivers. He was bent over, totally focused on his work, his tongue stuck out in concentration. I realized I was staring.

 _Okay, so Marco was right._ I thought, tearing my eyes away. Armin was pretty cute. Anyone could see that. I had admitted that the day I met him, to myself at least. Especially with his hair tied up like it was right now, loose strands catching the light as he brushed them out of his eyes. I was staring again, with absolutely no recollection of turning my head to look. A customer tapped me on the shoulder, and I busied myself with their order, followed by several more, before the next brief lull during which no one came through the door. When it finally arrived, Eren went to refill the chocolate sprinkles, and I wiped down the counter.

“So,” I said, throwing the rag over my shoulder, “how do you know how to fix a blender?”

Armin stopped what he was doing and sat up straight.

“Well, when things break in the house I always try and fix them. Money’s tight you know? But to be honest I take apart lots of things that aren’t broken too. The Internet’s great isn’t it? There are tutorials on everything. I guess I just like knowing things about the world, how it works. It might come in handy someday, like right now.” He went back to his work the second he was finished speaking, and I got the impression he thought he was talking too much. It was the most he’d spoken to me since my disaster of an apology.

“Yeah, for real. You’re saving both of our butts. I mean, I know you’re doing it for Eren, but you have no idea how big of a help it’ll be if you actually fix the thing.”

Armin stopped again, but when he looked up I saw he was wearing that expression from the very first night, two weeks ago. Determined and precise, on a mission I couldn’t begin to understand.

“I’m not just doing it for Eren. I’m doing it because I want to. Someone has to think of the citizens, Jean. What will this town do without the capitalist reassurance of novelty drinks at ridiculous prices?” And he turned away again, back to the dismantled blender. I stood there in a dazed kind of silence.

 “Excuse me? My daughter sent me here for a Franken-slime. Do you have any idea when the blender will be back in operation?”

My head snapped around, and my eyes fell on a middle-aged man fiddling nervously with his keys.

“We’ve got our best tactician working on it right now, sir.”

“It’s technician you idiot,” said Eren, reappearing with the refilled sprinkle cans and elbowing me in the ribs as he put them back in their place by the chocolate sauce.

“Yeah whatever.”

It was a half hour before closing when Armin finally rose, hoisting the blender triumphantly over his head.

“It works! Well, it should work…I think it works!” He glanced between Eren and I as the few customers enjoying their ice cream in the parlor gave a small round of applause. “Who wants to plug it in and see?”

“Jean will!” Eren said, shoving me in Armin’s direction. I scowled at him, but took the blender and approached the counter. I noticed Armin cringing along with me as I put the plug carefully in the socket, but for once no sparks flew, and when I pressed puree, the whir of the blender was smoother than I could say I had ever heard it.

Armin broke into a smile that could have cured cancer, reaching up and grabbing my arm. I tensed immediately, and Armin let go just as fast.

“Sorry,” he said, his ears doing their usual blushing thing, “I got excited. I’ve actually taken lots of blenders apart before, but this is the only one that’s ever worked when I put it back together!”

I nodded, meaning to say something like cool! or that’s good for you! but ending up emitting something like a gargle as Eren grabbed Armin and put him into a friendly headlock. My heart was beating disturbingly fast. I never thought I could get so excited about a functioning blender. Still, the removal of the threat of electrocution was nothing to scoff at.  

The rest of the evening passed pleasantly, as Eren and I made the last customers of the evening their Franken-slimes, and Armin remained behind the counter, eating a complimentary, extra large serving of Strawberry Dream ice cream. When we finally parted ways for the night, I found my spirits were high, higher than they’d been in weeks. Who knew a blender could affect my mood in this way? Life truly was miraculous, I thought as I peddled home, successfully ignoring the strange heavy feeling that had been sitting in my chest for the past several hours.

~

I didn’t work the next day, or the day after that. My weird euphoria from Friday night wore off quickly, especially when Marco called early on Saturday to say we would have to reschedule our plans. He’d forgotten he was taking a mock version of the PSAT. Lame. When I finally did come in, the next Tuesday afternoon, Eren was nowhere in sight. I waited twenty minutes, then picked up the phone and called Mike, who apologized for not getting anyone to fill in. Apparently Eren had a viable excuse for not being at work. He had done this once before, and I hadn’t received an explanation then either. I figured it was a doctor’s appointment or something. As if it mattered.

I handled the customers fine on my own, going through the paces as usual, until half an hour before closing when I heard the bell over the door ringing once again. I stopped what I was doing. Eren must have told him he wasn’t going to be at work today. It couldn’t be him, but there he was; blond hair and blue eyes and an overlarge sweatshirt, the same one he’d been wearing the night we met. Well, the night I met him, at least. I felt a horrific wave of something like two parts happiness one-part nausea wash over me. _What the hell was that?_

“Is-“ Armin started.

“Eren’s not here.”

“Oh.” He said. “Where is he?”

“No idea.”

Another “oh,” followed by five seconds silence. “I guess I should go then.” He gave me a small smile, and my heart, which had just been hammering, seemed to stop completely. It suddenly occurred to me how nice it would be to spend an hour or two alone with Armin. How nice it would be to talk to him about all the strange things he seemed to be an expert in. How nice it would be to press him against the glass that separated the people from the ice cream and kiss him. It hit me just like that, all at once.

_I like him. He’s best friends with Eren Jaeger, and he laughs at jokes about my face looking like a horses face, and I definitely like him._

 In the split second during which Armin made to turn towards the door, I made my decision. I had previously been rather annoyed by his unexplained absence, I was currently blessing whatever force of man or nature had prevented Eren from attending work today.

“You don’t have to go.” I said. “How about I repay you for fixing the mixer. You like strawberry milkshakes right?” If Armin thought it was creepy I knew this, he didn’t show it.

“But, I got free ice cream the other day.” He said.

“Well, yeah. It’s fine if you don’t want one, I just thought, you know.”

This was going terribly. I wanted to crawl under a rock and never emerge.

“No! I’d love one.” Armin walked back up to the counter, smiling again.

I began to feel very, very strange inside, as I allowed the previously inconceivable truth wash over me, more like a tsunami than a gentle beach wave.

For the last two weeks, I had been torturing myself, trying to find some excuse for having a crush on Eren Jaeger’s best friend. Eren Jaeger’s best friend who I had apparently, failed to notice for multiple consecutive years.

I told myself it couldn’t be true, that it was too sudden, to weird to be real. But now I had the facts. Armin Arlert was nothing like Eren Jaeger. He was smart and funny and witty and kind, and I wanted it to be me he came to The Cow to see, not Jaeger. I felt like ice cream that’s been out in the sun for too long. Flinging the freezer door open, I began to scoop strawberry delight as quickly as possible, imagining that if I crawled in there with it, the cold might stop the melting.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter includes an almost date, and some jeanmarco bonding time. Thanks for reading!


	4. The Sleepover

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At last! A completely new chapter!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not much in the way of notes today, but I did want to say that one of my favorite things to do is make subtle (and not so subtle) cannon references. I don't know if anyone has noticed them in the previous chapters, but I enjoy them so much they will definitely continue.
> 
> Thanks for reading!

Armin was sipping his milkshake in his usual seat, and I was talking about my third grade art teacher. Mr. Pope. What a complete asshole. The whole conversation started because Armin didn’t believe I had actually drawn all the stuff on the ‘flavors of the day’ board. I told him I did a new one every week. It was always just a few cows and a few scoops of ice cream and some fancy writing, but Armin seemed to think it was really good, which pleased me. He asked me why I didn’t do it in school, and my answer was Mr. Pope.

“The man ruined art for me.” I said. Armin raised his eyebrows at me.

“All art? Forever? He ruined Picasso? Van Gough?”

“He told an eight year old his dolphin drawings weren’t _soulful_ enough.” I said. “There was plenty of soul in those fucking dolphins,” I added under my breath. Armin laughed. “I only drew dolphins because my Aunt works at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Maybe if I’d drawn butterflies or something Mr. Pope wouldn’t have been such a prick.” Armin put down his milkshake, eyes suddenly wide.

“Your Aunt works at Monterey Bay Aquarium?”

“Yeah. I used to go all the time when I was a kid. You ever been?”

“Once. But its one of my top ten dream internships.” Of course Armin already had a list of dream internships.

“That’s cool. So you want to be a marine biologist? Or like an oceanographer or something?” Armin shrugged.

“I don’t know. I feel like I want to do everything sometimes. Just keep doing new stuff forever. The ocean, then the rainforest, then the desert. Maybe I’ll be an astronaut.” He said with a small smile.

I didn’t think I’d ever heard something so wonderful and interesting, but I couldn’t say that.

“That’s cool.” There was a pause as Armin took the lid off his milkshake to stir it around.

“What do you want to do then?” He asked.

“Me?” Everything I usually told people suddenly seemed too mortifyingly boring to repeat to Armin. “I don’t really know either. Something good. Steady I guess.”

“You should be an artist,” Armin said, “fuck Mr. Pope.” I almost dropped the ice cream scoop I was twirling in my hands. For some reason, it felt weird to hear Armin swear. He was too pure? Then again, he was friends with Eren, who had a worse mouth than I did.

“Artist doesn’t pay.” I said, not thinking. Another silence fell, this time a bit awkward.

“You guys do really well in tips don’t you?” Said Armin suddenly, eyeing our tip jar, which was almost spilling over with dollar bills. My heart nearly stopped. Oh no. He’d noticed the tip jar. I couldn’t tell him about the tip jar. No one could ever know.

“Yes,” I said, “we’re very lucky.” If Armin could see me sweating, he didn’t mention it.

“It’s definitely the outfits,” he said. I rolled my eyes.

“Don’t remind me. They’re humiliating.” I tweaked one of my felt ears. Armin opened his mouth, but the words he was about to say seemed to get stuck in his throat. Eventually he closed his mouth and coughed instead, letting my statement stand. If he was embarrassed to agree with me he really didn’t have to be. It was a simple fact. I was a sixteen year old boy dressed as a cow for pay, and that’s all there was too it. I said as much, and Armin laughed again.

“Eren complains about the uniform all the time too. Speaking of which, I really have no idea where he is today. Its weird, he said he’d be at work today this morning. Then he just disappeared after gym.”

“Really?” I said, my interest piqued.

“Yeah. And he hasn’t answered any of my texts.” Very fascinating.

“Well, Mike called earlier, and he knew Eren wasn’t going to be here. He didn’t sound angry either. It must be something legitimate if Mike let him off work.”

“I guess,” said Armin. He twisted his straw around as he took another sip of milkshake, slurping up the dregs. “Thanks for this again,” he said, “I should probably get going though. I told my Grandpa I would only be over here for a few minutes.” I glanced at my watch. It had been almost an hour and a half since Armin had come in. How did that happen? Had we been talking the whole time?

“Right. Of course. No problem.” I said.

Armin threw his empty cup in the trash and headed for the door. He was leaving. When would I see him alone again? He turned to say goodbye, but before he could say anything, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head.

“If you want, I can take you down to Monterey Bay sometime. I mean, if the aquarium is really one of your top ten dream internships, maybe you could meet my Aunt. I’m sure she could tell you about the program.”

Armin stared at me.

“You’d do that?”

“Why not?” I shrugged.

“Monterey is almost an hour away.” He had that ‘on a mission’ face again.

“It’s not like I have anything better to do. Besides, an hour is nothing. Marco and I take the bus for like two hours to get to this one chicken place sometimes.”

“Then…yes,” Armin said, “if you really don’t mind. This coming weekend is a long one. Do you think, maybe Sunday?”

“Let’s do it,” I said. I would have driven to Los Angeles and back just for the grin that was on Armin’s face as he walked out of the shop.

~

The rest of the week flew by. On Thursday, Armin caught me outside of Biology to ask how we were getting to Monterey, as neither of us drove. I told him which bus stop to meet me at, and he hurried away. As he disappeared around the corner, Marco, who had been standing there throughout the whole exchange, raised his eyebrows at me.

“What?” I said. He raised his eyebrows even further. “What?”

“What do you mean what? What the fuck was that? Are you going on a date with Armin Arlert? What happened to him pissing you off?”

“Shut up!” I said. “Look, Saturday okay? I’ll explain when you stay over on Saturday.”

Preparing for Marco to come over meant gathering all the blankets and pillows we had in the house and piling them on my bedroom floor, in front of my tiny television. If history was any indication we would both fall asleep there anyway. Next I went to the store and bought my weight in heart attack inducing snacks. God bless Little Debbie, wherever she ended up. Finally, I filled a bucket with ice and stuck it in the corner by all the pillows and blankets. MP was best served cold. The first thing Marco did when he traipsed into my bedroom on Saturday afternoon was plunge the two twelve packs he had bought directly into the ice.

“Good call,” he said. We settled down and played video games for about an hour. The whole time he kept shooting me looks, which I ignored. Eventually however, we put down the controllers to rip into the snacks, and Marco took his opportunity.

“Dude,” he said, “what’s going on with Armin? Where are you guys going?” I sighed.

“Look, its not what you think, its complicated,” I said. Oh god. He was going to be so annoying about this. I steeled myself. “Basically, what’s going on is…I like him.”

Marco didn’t even blink.

“Dude did you hear me?”

“I heard you. Armin huh?” I couldn’t believe I was actually feeling let down by his lack of reaction. “And you’re sure about this?”

“Sure? Of course I’m sure! It’s a fucking mystery how he puts up with Jaeger, a mystery I have no fucking clue if I’m ever going to solve, but he’s not Jaeger, and I hate myself, I hate myself Marco, but I definitely like him.”

Apparently this was the kind of confession Marco had been waiting for. A grin was slowly spreading across his face. It was as annoying as I thought it would be, and also somehow very creepy.

“Marco. You’re scaring me.”

“I knew it.” He said, clearly pleased with himself. “I knew it right after you called me the night you met him. You were way too freaked out.”

“Good for you.” I said, stuffing an entire marshmallow pie into my mouth.

“So what are you going to do?” I tried to reply through my mouth full of marshmallow.

“What do you mean what am I going to do?” It came out muffled, but Marco got the gist.

“I mean what’s next? Are you going to ask him out? Did you already ask him out? Is that what tomorrow is all about?”

“No.” I said, unable to keep the disappointment out of my voice. I explained about Armin’s dream internships and my Aunt.

“That’s basically a date though,” he said, “you’re going to ask him out for real eventually right?”

“I don’t know,” I said, leaning back onto a stack of pillows, “I’ve barely thought about anything past what’s happening tomorrow. I don’t even know why he would like me back. And even if he did, there’s still so much crap. There’s school; no one except you even knows I’m into other guys. There’s my parents; haven’t told them either. And oh god, there’s still Jaeger. He’s still best friends with Jaeger, even if they’re nothing alike. I can’t spend more time with Jaeger then I already have to. I’ll lose my mind.”

“Jean, relax.” Marco said.

“How can I relax?” I said. I was really starting to sweat now. The reality of what liking Armin meant was crashing down upon me, and I was definitely drowning in it. “I have to take him to the aquarium tomorrow. Am I supposed to dress nice or something? What if I do and he thinks it’s a date and freaks out and never wants to talk to me again? What are we even going to talk about for that long? Pff-“

Marco had thrown a pillow in my face. He handed me an MP next, silently. I downed it, threw the can in a corner, and coughed.

“That was exactly the last thing I needed. Was that supposed to calm me down? There’s like two hundred grams of sugar in like each can.”

“First,” said Marco, “this is not the end of the world. Liking someone is not the apocalypse. Even though, knowing you, you might actually do better with an apocalypse.” I grimaced. Probably true. “Second,” he continued, “You’ll figure it out. You can wing it. Winging it is one of the core Kirschtien strengths is it not?”

“It is,” I agreed.

“Right. You’re not a planning person. You’re not good at, you know, having your life together.”

“Hey, I’m trying over here!” I said. Marco grinned.

“What I’m saying is you’re already good at making stuff up as you go along, so you can make this up too.” Marco was looking at me the way he sometimes did, like he really believed in me. That look was the reason I knew he would be my best friend for the rest of my life.

“Fine,” I said, “I’ll wing it. But I’m still going to be freaking out the whole time! You’d better be prepared for that! It’s going to be 24/7 freaking out.”   Marco rolled his eyes but agreed, and we both downed a can of MP just to seal the deal. We went back to video games after that, got tired of video games, played connect four, played cards, finished off the rest of the food, and fell into a food coma around nine pm, much to early for bed. We talked about school and family like we always did. I pressed Marco about his own love life, but he insisted he wasn’t interested in anyone. I wasn’t sure I believed him. While Marco might have been a lot better than me about hiding his feelings, there was something dodgy in his eyes. Unfortunately he managed to turn the conversation around, telling me that if by some miracle (thanks Marco) Armin and I started dating, I had better be good to him. Marco liked Armin, they studied together sometimes, it turned out, and I’d better not taint his pureness with any of my _Jean_.

“He’s not that pure. He hangs out with Jaeger. He swears.” I finished lamely. To be fair I doubted there was a high school student in California who didn’t swear.

“That isn’t really the type of pureness I was referring to,” said Marco. It took me a minute.

“Jesus Christ Marco. We’ve spoken three times.”

Finally we fell asleep, on the floor surrounded by empty chip bags and plastic wrappers as usual.

~

We woke up the next morning tangled in the blankets and practically spooning. Marco wanted breakfast, so I handed him a cereal bar before shoving him out the front door.

“What gives?” He said, hair still mussed up, toothbrush in hand. He tried to come back inside, but I gave him another push and handed him his shoes.

“I have to go meet Armin. And before that I have to get dressed and re check the bus times and pack some snacks because I’m way too poor for the aquarium cafeteria food.”

“That’ll take an hour at most,” said Marco, “it’s seven thirty! You’re not meeting Armin until ten!” But I was having none of it. Once Marco was gone, I stepped right into the shower, an hour ahead of schedule.

It was good that I started ahead of schedule, because it took me about an hour to pick out my clothes. It would have taken longer, but after I had changed back out of the thirteenth outfit option, Marco called. He didn’t even say hello.

“For the love of god Jean just wear what you usually wear to school.”

He hung up immediately afterwards. Marco knew me so well; I really loved him.  I almost felt bad for kicking him out of the house so early. Almost.

When I was finally dressed I went into the kitchen, and told my mom where I was going while I shoved a few apples and some cheese sticks into my backpack.  At last I was on my way. As I walked down the street, the nervous excitement I had been feeling since I woke up started to become just nerves. Marco told me to wing it, but what _were_ we going to talk about? It was a long bus ride down to Monterey. I told myself it would be fine once I got to the bus stop and saw Armin. But what if he went to the wrong bus stop? I told him the one by the corner of Macintosh and Clifton, right? What if he had to cancel altogether?

Just then I realized I didn’t have Armin’s cell phone number. I worried about all this and much more until I got to the bus stop, and saw Armin sitting there.  He was dressed in a cardigan, and a pale blue t-shirt. Holy shit. If I thought I wanted to kiss him the night he fixed the blender…I _really_ wanted to kiss him today. He stood up when he spotted me, and gave me a tentative smile.

“Hi!” he said. He turned and rooted around in his bag. “I brought you an orange juice. I’ve got some granola bars too if you want them. I thought you might not have eaten breakfast.”

Truthfully, I wasn’t that hungry. I was too nervous to be hungry. But I hadn’t eaten breakfast, just as Armin predicted, and thought some sugar in my system might be a decent idea. I didn’t want to pass out later, and I was already half way there at the moment.

“Sounds good.” I said. Armin took out two maple flavored granola bars, and silence (or at least as much as was possible with the crunching of the granola) fell as we ate and waited. We were still eating when the bus pulled up, and we clambered on. My granola bar was long gone by the time the bus found its way onto the interstate, but the silence lingered on. Marco had told me it would be okay to wing it. We would find something to talk about. Marco had said I was good at winging it.

Marco had lied to me.

I looked over at Armin, sitting quietly just like he did in algebra. I must have been crazy when I thought this was a good idea.

_What was I thinking?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah public transportation. These kids think they are going on a cliche Jearmin trip to the aquarium. Spoilers: they'll never make it. Best worst first kind of date ever!  
> Sorry the next chapter is so short, I felt it needed to be in there.


	5. An Aside

_Armin. Saturday Night._

 

Eren called right in the middle of a daydream. I was replaying my conversation with Jean in my head for nearly the millionth time. He’d been complaining about his uniform, and I had almost ruined everything. I had almost told him how cute it was, and that would have freaked Jean out, because, in his words, he wasn’t like that.

I picked up the phone.

“Hi Eren.” He started off talking about some movie that was coming out the next day, and I knew he was about to ask me if I wanted to come. I knew I should tell him about the trip to the aquarium. It wouldn’t be weird because it was completely platonic, a mere favor between acquaintances. It wouldn’t matter if Eren freaked out because obviously nothing was ever going to happen between Jean and I. Obviously. It wouldn’t lead to anything; there would be no second aquarium trip. It most certainly would not be a date, so I could tell Eren about it. There was no reason not to tell Eren about it.

“So? Can you hang out tomorrow?” He asked.

“I can’t, sorry. I’ve got to help my Grandpa move some stuff down from the attic.”

“Aw, too bad. See you Monday maybe?”

“Yeah, Monday.”

I hung up the phone, and flopped down on my bed, smiling in spite of myself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh Armin. 
> 
> Next chapter really is about their bus adventure. I promise.


	6. The Tree

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I updated. It's a miracle. Thanks for sticking with me, you're all stars.

This was what being in hell felt like. For starters, the day was exceptionally hot for October. I could already feel my thighs starting to sweat inside my jeans. Add the fact that I was currently on the world’s weirdest, tensest non-date, and the bus might as well have been on fire. I was staring at the seat in front of me, doing everything but looking at Armin, which was difficult.

“Does-“ I said, stopping before the rest of the sentence could make it out of my mouth.

“What?” said Armin. We looked at each other. Shit. I had been thinking: does Jaeger know he’s here right now? I definitely hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

“Does…” I couldn’t think of anything else to ask, “does Eren know about the aquarium?”

He gave me the strangest look then. Was it confusion? If I didn’t know better I’d have said he was flustered.

“No, he doesn’t,” he said, “why?”

I shrugged.

“Just wondering.”

Silence again. Then,

“Thanks again for doing this. I don’t really know how to repay a favor this big. I can’t even buy you lunch. I brought my own.”

“Hey, me too!” I said, privately thinking of a few ways he could repay the favor that in no way involved money.

“Ha, I guess that’s good then,” Armin said, toying with a frayed edge on his bag.

Silence. _Again._ Was this it then? Not a date, but some weird business like trade off? _Ah yes, I was the world’s biggest prick to you when we met, so taking into account the repaired blender, I calculate you are owed exactly one trip to Monterrey and potential internship contact._  

Why I had suggested this was clear if not extremely stupid. I’d wanted to see him again, talk to him again. Without Jaeger. Blissfully, without Jaeger. Why Armin had agreed to it was less obvious. We barely knew each other. Plus, Eren hated me just as much as I hated him. Whatever he said about me when I wasn’t around, I could hardly imagine it painted a shining picture. I hadn’t even realized he _existed_ , for _over a year_. I guessed he was, as I had imagined, looking at this like a business move.

“How are you doing in Algebra?”

I blinked at him.

“Uh, okay I guess. Not great or anything.” Armin’s eyes widened, and I swore for a second I could see myself reflected in them, which was some romantic bullshit if I ever heard it.

“I could tutor you! I’m good at Algebra! Well, I’m okay, I mean, I make A’s and everything.” I grinned, and the bus cooled a few degrees. I’d take it, even if it was an extra hour or so learning math.

“Yeah, that’d be good.” Armin grinned back. “So you brought your own lunch too huh? I’ve got cheese and apples, which is pretty hard to beat,” Armin laughed, “what’ve you got?”

“I’ve got tuna.”

“Tuna? At the aquarium? You’ve got to be joking!” I laughed at my own joke too loudly, which was lame, but Armin kept on laughing with me anyway. And for a about thirty miles, things were actually going well. I couldn’t wait to get to Monterrey, watch Armin looking at all the fish, see the dolphins. Dolphins were still pretty cool, even if they’d ruined my artistic career by proxy. But I was me, and just as we were passing out of a dismally small town, the bus started to shudder.

“Oh,” said Armin, a crease forming in between his eyebrows.

“Did we hit something?” I asked.

“No,” said Armin, “when a car shudders like that, it’s usually the,” and then he said something very technical and very unnecessary, because I grasped the scope of the problem as soon as the white smoke started to pour from under the hood. We came to an abrupt stop.

“Okay, everybody off the bus!”

Armin and I hurried out with the rest of the passengers, clutching our bags.

“I’ll sort this out, don’t worry,” said the driver, waving his cap to clear the smoke. I glanced sideways at Armin, who gave me a slight shake of the head.

“How long do you think?” I whispered, as the people around us grumbled.

“How long until the next bus comes around?”

“This route? Like four hours I think.”

“Four hours.”

I groaned. Why couldn’t one thing go right when it came to Armin? When it came to anything really, but _especially_ Armin.

“Should we walk into the town? We have time.”

“Yeah, why not.”

We trudged a few blocks away from the bus until we reached a small park. The town was really a lot nicer than I’d given it credit for at first, a kind of safe haven in the middle of the rocky California territory we’d just been passing through. It was still pretty early, and the park was almost completely empty.

“It’s kind of eerie,” I said, glancing left at the deserted playground, the swings swaying gently in despite the lack of any breeze I could feel.

“I like it,” said Armin, “it’s calm here.” He stopped next to a park bench and sat down on it cross legged. “Sit down. I promise it’ll be a long time till that bus starts up again.”

“Yeah, but what if they fix it, like what if it’s a miracle fix up and then we’re stuck here longer than we need to be? Or if they send a replacement service really fast for once?”

Armin raised his eyebrows at me so high that for a second he almost looked like Jaeger. Almost.

“You don’t trust me? The kind individual who fixed your blender?” He sounded confident enough, but I noticed his ears were turning red again.

“I do! Its just, its better to play it safe right?” Armin sighed and stood up, turning in a circle as if sizing up the park.

“There,” he said, and started to jog back the way we had come. I followed at a fast walk, bewildered as he veered off the concrete path and stopped at the foot of an impressive oak.

“It’s a tree,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I’m missing something here.”

“We climb it. We’ll be able to see the bus from near the top.” Someone else, maybe lots of other people, would have thought this was a great plan. I wasn’t one of them.

“We can’t climb it, it’s not allowed.” It was maybe the lamest thing I’d ever said. I realized this as I said it, and simultaneously seemed to hear Armin thinking, _Eren was right, this guy’s really lame._ “How do we get up though?” I asked, hoping it would seem as if I had said it wasn’t allowed only to highlight how okay I was with breaking the rules. It was a valid question though; there were no low hanging branches.

“You help me up, I help you up, one at a time.”

“Uh, ok.” I gave Armin a leg up, and he scrambled onto the lowest but still very high branch surprisingly fast. The perks of being small. I was another story. Armin was stronger than he looked, but I still had to struggle, ending up hanging from the same branch by just my arms, trying to swing one leg over. I desperately needed some sort of grappling equipment. Finally, I made it up, and from there things were much simpler. The branches may not have been low, but they were all sturdy looking, and very close together. We were around two thirds of the way up when…

“Wow, you can actually see it.” The top of the stopped bus was just visible beyond two streets of thankfully low buildings.

“I told you,” said Armin, cheery, “if we start to see people getting on, we’ll head back.” I didn’t mention that if people were getting on we probably wouldn’t make it in time, that it would take us a while to get down from this tree, that someone might come and yell at us any second now. We were in the tree, and it was what it was, and lo and behold, we were actually talking.

“So, how do you stand spending time with Jaeger?” I didn’t really want to talk about Eren, but couldn’t pretend this question hadn’t been haunting me from day one. Armin shrugged.

“We lived near each other when we were kids. We’ve been friends since forever. Since before Mikasa.”

“Before Mikasa?”

“Yeah, she’s adopted,” the pink ears made an appearance, “I guess people don’t really know that. Don’t spread it around or anything.”

“I’d never,” I said, putting a hand over my heart and trying to suppress a smile. I’d take it to my grave if he asked me too. All that really mattered was I finally had proof that someone as attractive as Mikasa and someone as depressingly bland as Eren could _never_ be related by blood. “So you’ve just been stuck with him for years huh? Unfortunate.”

“He’s not that bad,”

“I really have to disagree. Did he tell you about the mint chip incident? Of course he didn’t. Let me tell you about the mint chip incident.”

We kept talking. About everything. The cow and school at first, but then other stuff, projects Armin was working on and how long me and Marco had been friends, and what movies we liked best (suspense ones, both of us, surprisingly).

Eventually I got curious about the time. I looked at my watch and almost fell out of the tree. It was just like the first day we’d talked alone in the cow; we’d been up here almost an hour and a half.

“I don’t think I could kill someone, if it came down to it,” Armin said, continuing our previous conversation, “so I probably wouldn’t last very long.”

“This is super dark,” I noted, “how did it get this dark?”

“Well, you mentioned the apocalypse,”

“Right.” Armin gave a little nod and threw the leaf he’d been twirling off the roof. He looked at me.

“It’s really easy to talk to you.”

All the gravity in the world might as well have stopped working.

“Don’t you mean awkward?” I said, remembering the disastrous beginnings to pretty much every conversation we’d ever had.

“It’s awkward to start talking. Then it’s easy.”

“Right,” I said, not sure whether I was pleased or not.

“So,” said Armin, squinting into the sun, “Monterrey.”

“Right,” I said, “well, its almost noon, so we’ll still have time, even if it is another couple hours till the next bus shows up. We probably won’t be able to see the whole thing but you’ll at least get to meet-”

“Do you want to try it another day instead?”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Yes, oh my god. It’s so hot.”

“I know. I’m exhausted. And its been so cold lately!”

“We must live in the worst possible universe,” I said, blinking sweat out of my eyes.

“Maybe,” said Armin with one of those signature tiny smiles I was beginning to really like, especially when I made them happen.

“Jean?”

“Yeah?”

“I know how much you hate Eren, but, maybe we could be friends?”

Normally, when something caught me off guard like this, I lost the ability to speak. Now however, it was like I couldn’t get the words out fast enough.

“Yeah. Sure. Of course. We’re friends, now. Totally, friends.” _Stop talking Jean_.

It was awkward. I had to admit it, no matter how much I liked him. It was awkward, and weird. Abnormal. The opposite of everything I’d ever imagined for myself. But, another weird fact: I didn’t mind.

“I’m glad,” he said. He looked back down to where his leaf had landed on the ground. He turned away from me then, and for one terrifying second I thought he was crying. Then I realized it was laughter. Not even laughter- _giggling_. Only way to describe it.

“What?” I said. He shook his head.

“I don’t know, it’s just, I-” but he didn’t seem to be able to stop himself. He looked so different from the quiet kid in Algebra who barely moved let alone spoke, let alone _giggled_. Who was this kid? Who really was he? I realized I was laughing too. We were laughing like we had on the bus, only louder this time. It bounced all the way down the tree and onto the ground.

I had been so caught up in it all, I’d freaked out and made the whole thing into a mess in my head. The way I’d been going on about what Jaeger and the rest of the world would think, anyone might have guessed we were getting married. Instead, we’d decided to be friends. It was such a simple, easy step. I could handle friends. Even as friends, there was so much to figure out, why make things too complicated too fast? _And in time, who knows_ , I thought, _maybe all the other stuff I was thinking about will seem easy too. And then…well, who knows_. I made my decision. I was going to take it slow. Easy, just like this. Smooth sailing. Wasn’t that what I had always wanted?

“Okay,” said Armin, breaking my train of thought, “now we figure out how to get back home.”

“Oh fuck, I forgot.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What happened to the other bus passengers? Did they just sit at the side of the road for four hours? Shouldn’t a bus come more often than four hours? I’m not sure. Let’s just say they made it home safe ok. Thanks for your patience. 
> 
> But more importantly! One of the reasons it's been so long since this fic has updated is that I've been busy running a writing blog! If you're interested in following me, you can find me at www.roughwaterwriting.tumblr.com. I do writing advice, writing encouragement, and cute pictures of octopuses. Feel free to send me a message any time, about anything. I may not blog about snk, but I'm always happy to discuss! Hope to see some of you on tumblr!


	7. An Emergency

_Armin, four days later. 11:30 PM_

 

It had been four days. Four days since I’d gone on the world’s most disastrous non-date with my best friend’s worst enemy. Four days since the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders. Since we’d decided to be friends, and he didn’t think I was weird, and maybe we really could be friends, and I would just bury the funny feeling I got in my stomach every time I caught him looking at me until I died of old age. Four days later, and now I was climbing the oak tree in the Jaeger’s backyard, scraping my arms and my face on branches, panting as I finally got high enough to knock on Mikasa’s window. Swallowing hard as she appeared, bewildered, and opened the window. It had been years since I’d come up this way, since before their dad left.

“Armin? We have a door? What the hell?”

I looked her straight in the eye, and said it quick, like ripping off a band aid.

“I kissed Jean Kirschtien.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mikasa: “You are so fucked.”
> 
> Next Chapter: Jean, four days later, 12:15 PM


	8. The Misunderstanding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mikasa: Well what did he say?  
> Armin: He didn’t say anything!  
> Mikasa: You are so truly fucked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An update? An update not over a year after the last update? Hold the applause guys. (But seriously, thanks for sticking with me.) Thanks for reading!

_Jean, four days later, 12:15 PM_

I was having a wonderful day. I’d sustained chemical burns, a minor concussion, and now the entire cafeteria was staring at me as I scrubbed my lunch off the floor with a hand brush. No, wait, hold on. I was having _the worst day of my life_. Marco sat the the table nearest to me, nodding, processing the situation.

“I mean, you tried. You failed. Miserably. But at least you tried.” I groaned.

            Three days earlier, Marco had called and grilled me about the non-date, which was really pretty good of him considering the treatment he had suffered at my hands as a result of said ‘not a date whatsoever.’

“So yeah, I guess we’re friends now. It’s cool.”

“Its cool.” Marco repeated, his voice deadpan.

“Yeah, its chill, you know.”

“Its chill.” I was famously bad at picking up signals, but his tone of voice was beginning to suggest to me that everything was not in fact ‘chill’.

“What man? You’re freaking me out!”

“You’re going to be friends? Chill friends who’ve just been on the world’s first and last tree-date? You can’t handle that.”

“It wasn’t a date. And says who?”

“Jean, two days ago I watched you have a small scale breakdown. I won’t lie to you, it was hard to witness, but I’m glad I did, because now I can say I’m one hundred percent sure you can’t handle this.”

“Shut up! It’s a good thing! It’s trying to think about anything past friends that I can’t handle.” I said, mumbling the last sentence.

“Uh huh, sure. You figured it all out in the tree right?”

“Maybe I’m that guy now Marco. Maybe I’m that guy who figures his shit out in a tree.”

“I still say it sounds like it was a date. A really weird date, but still a date.”

“Support me on this friends thing will you? Besides, I’m actually not even sure he likes guys. I guess I just assumed. Is that bad?” It wasn’t even how he looked or acted, I wasn’t that big of an asshole. It had more to do with his association with Eren, who never shut up in general, and didn’t draw the line at who he wanted to bang.  Seeing as Marco knew Armin better, I’d been expecting a reply somewhere along the lines of, _oh, don’t add that to your list of worries Jean, Armin is definitely gay!_  Instead I got:

“Yeah, me neither actually. No one’s ever mentioned it, but like I said he’s pretty quiet compared to Eren, so I’m not surprised.”

“Great,” I said, punching the pillow I was holding.

“But I guess it doesn’t matter, if you’re super chill about being friends right? You’ll find out eventually, probably. All in good time.”

“Right,” I said. Still, when I hung up the phone a few minutes later, I realized I had been grinding my teeth.  I stopped. I could handle this. Marco was wrong, for once. I _could_ handle this.

School the next day was the beginning of the end.

            I had already been having a weird morning by the time I got to first period. A block from school, I’d seen Eren, but not on in his old pickup. He was getting out of a shiny car, so big I almost could have called it a limo. I almost stopped, but stopping would mean talking to Eren, and I was in no mood, as usual. Still, who’s car was that? His dad’s maybe? But why did Eren want to leave it before anyone could see him? This suspicious behavior bothered me all the way into biology, where it was erased from my mind the second I head the words _Armin Arlert_ aimed in my direction.

“What?” I said, turning around to look at Connie, somewhat dazed.

“I said, where did you go with Armin Arlert on Sunday? I didn’t know you guys were friends.”

“What?” I repeated, now confused for a set of completely different reasons. Connie answered me very slowly, exaggerating every syllable.

“W h e r e   d i d   y o u   g o   w i t h   A r m i n   o n   S u n d a y   I   s a w   y o u   a t   t h e   b u s   s t o p   t o g e t h e r.”

“Oh, uh, yeah we’re friends, we-” I barely had time to attempt to pull together something like the truth when Reiner joined the conversation.

“You hung out with Armin? I didn’t know you two knew each other. How’d that happen?”

I glanced at Marco, whose wide eyes seemed to be whispering _I told you you couldn’t handle it._ But Marco was wrong! I could handle it! We were friends and we were chill and everything was cool and that was the truth! Right up until Sasha cut in.

“What? You and Armin? We’re you on a date?”

“No!” I said, probably way too loudly. And then, I don’t know. Somehow, handling it became breaking down in a matter of seconds. I had to give Marco credit. Because I could have said anything. I could have left it at no. I could have shaken my head, given a small laugh and said, _nah, it’s not like that_ , and changed the subject like the suave son of a bitch I think I am. Instead, I yelled, even louder than my first embarrassing no:

“I’m not gay!”

Marco put his head down on his desk. I mean, technically it was true. I appreciated girls as much as anybody. I just happened to also appreciate guys about as much as anybody. But that was splitting hairs. I returned, unfortunately, to the present moment, and the situation at hand.

“Jeez, okay,” said Connie, leaning back in his chair and raising his eyebrows. I saw Sasha mouthing _yikes_ out of the corner of my eye. I had to fix this, and I had to fix it now. I had to tell them that I just didn’t think it was right to assume two guys were dating because they hung out together. We were just friends, and I didn’t want any rumors going around that would embarrass Armin.

“Wait, hold on, I just don’t think it’s right that-”

“Kirschtien!” I whipped back around to find Dr. Shadis murdering me with a look from the front of the class. “Lecture has started, so not another word.” He went on some more about my attention span and “lack of concentration in his class resulting in subpar grades”, but I was more concerned with where he’d cut me off when I’d been talking to Connie, and how I could now hear him and Sasha whispering behind me, not loud enough to make out what they were saying. When the bell finally rang, Sasha gave me an expectant look. Relieved that she was giving me a chance to explain myself, I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. Something was stuck in my throat. Something distinctly Armin shaped. Because I knew how much I wanted to say it _was_ a date. How much I liked him, and _Sasha you know him right? Talk me up come on_. I also knew there were infinite reasons I definitely could not do that.

“I couldn’t date Armin, it wouldn’t be right, cause, you know,” I stuttered.

“Not really,” Sasha said, her voice cold. And then she was gone.

Next thing I registered as a sharp pain to the back of the head. Marco had hit me with a textbook.

“Jesus, stop using the phrase ‘wouldn’t be right’!”

Sasha could be a little weird, but she was funny, and braver than most (braver than me for sure), and people liked that.  She knew people. Lots of people. _Most_ people, as I was about to discover. By lunchtime, I was Jean Kirschtien, resident homophobe.

“Fucking fantastic,” I said into my pork chops, keeping my head low at our now empty cafeteria table. Only Marco remained to sit with me. Everyone else was suddenly four tables away, most likely discussing my bigotry.

“I told you you couldn’t-” Marco started.

“I think it’s pretty fucking clear I couldn’t handle it, thank you!” I said, head snapping up. Before I could bury it in my lunch again, I saw Armin walking past with Mikasa. He’d clearly just had gym. His hair was messy, like he’d just taken it down, and the tops of his cheeks were bright pink from the wind. He glanced at me for half a second, just as I was considering what it would be like to be the reason his hair was so messy, and my stomach jumped so violently I actually put a hand on it. I was distracted, of course, by the stone cold glare Mikasa was aiming at me. Unlike Armin, she did not look away. Had it spread that fast? I looked at Marco. The panic was coming in like a drumbeat in my ribcage, getting faster and faster, at odds with my heart. God, I felt dizzy.

“What do I do?” I had no idea how to stop something like this. Was I supposed to make some sort of announcement over the loudspeaker? Personally explain myself to every person in the school? Make it right with Sasha and Connie and hope word spread? What if after I opened with Hey, I’m definitely not homophobic, they started to wonder why I’d been so weird about it, about Armin, in the first place? What did I say then?  This was usually where Marco talked me down. I desperately needed to be talked down. Which made it especially crushing when he simply shook his head.

“I have no idea.”

            The news of my rampant homophobia had reached Eren by the time I got to work that afternoon. He pointed an accusatory finger at me as soon as I stepped through the door.

“I didn’t think you could get any shittier,” he said. He had his angry eyes full on, which was a serious danger sign. 

“It was all a misunderstanding,” I said. For the first time today my words seemed to be working. I hated Eren, and he knew it, and I was glad he knew it, but I hated him because he was an asshole, end of story. The idea of him thinking it was anything else was beyond our constant feuding. It was wrong.

“Like hell it was.”

“What, you don’t believe me? Come on, I’m serious. It wasn’t what it sounds like.”

“I don’t know what I expected.”

“I’ll explain.”

“Explain then.”

And just like that, I was stuck again. I couldn’t explain, especially to Eren, without bringing Armin into it. He didn’t even know we’d been out on Sunday. My second of hesitation pushed him over the edge.

“You know what? Don’t fucking talk to me! And don’t talk to Armin either, got it? We don’t need this from an asshole like you.”

I spent the rest of the shift attempting to come up with an explanation that sounded genuine and didn’t involve Armin, but it was really hard to explain away what looked like blatant homophobia, not accidentally come out to Eren, and serve ice cream to a children’s hockey team all at the same time. When we closed, Eren made it clear he planned to tell Mike and Hanji about my discriminatory views before hitting my bike with his pickup on the way out of the parking lot. I was so angry I thought about chasing him down, but Eren was angrier, and I wasn’t stupid enough to bet my bike against a moving vehicle. At least, I thought as I lay in bed that night, not sleeping, I had my definite answer regarding Armin’s preferences. And it only took convincing the entire school I hated gay people. Perfect.

            The next day, I faked sick. I wasn’t proud of it, no, but I needed time to think. I ran the dry cough, aches and pains play, which required some dedication but was almost always successful. Mom phoned the school and headed to work, and I came up with a plan. Is what I would have liked to say. Really I played video games and ate microwavable lasagna. I knew I needed to fix my situation, but every time I thought about Armin walking around thinking I hated him, I started to feel less fake aches and pains and more genuinely nauseous.

            On Thursday, I went back overly hopeful. Maybe the whole thing had blown over. I mean, could anyone really believe I was that big of a shit? The answer, disappointingly, overwhelmingly, was yes.  First period, right off the bat, Reiner spilled the entire chemical set we were working with right into my lap. Dr. Shadis cleaned me up, but my arms were still tingling an hour later, and Reiner never apologized. Desperate, I tried simply yelling at anyone who looked at me funny in the halls. This had the opposite of the desired effect, and when Marco found me cornering a freshman by the library, he hit me again with the book he’d just taken out. Hence the minor concussion. Then it was lunch again, and it was looking like I was headed towards true pariah status. I couldn’t take this one more day, let alone the entire year.  So when I passed Eren on my way back to my empty table, I had to take immediate, dumbass action. It was barely voluntary. I didn’t care that he was with Armin and Mikasa. I was shouting, and there was no stopping me now.

“Jaeger, listen to me, I need to say something.”

“I thought I told you not to talk to me?”

“When have I listened to you? When? Shut up for one second and let me-” but Eren had lunged forward so suddenly he definitely could have gotten in at least one good punch if Mikasa hadn’t grabbed him from behind. Either way, it surprised me, and I let go of my lunch tray.

My nachos splattered on the floor, face down, truly tragic, while the tray itself made a clang that attracted the attention of everyone not already listening to our argument.

“Jesus! I’m done with everyone thinking I’m the fucking worst, so listen up. I have an explanation,” I said. I did not have an explanation. Winging it. The Kirschtien way.

“You expect me to feel sorry for you? Here’s what’s happening, okay? No one gives a shit about you or your shitty opinions, so stop playing the fucking victim!”

“Oh my god,” I said, beyond worrying, beyond stress, beyond done. “I don’t care! I’m the last person who cares! I’ll have sex with anyone ok? Fucking anyone!” Looking back, I’m not sure the entire cafeteria fell silent at this pronouncement, but it sure felt like it. Eren didn’t say anything, for once. He just gave me a very odd look. It might have been pity. Finally, Mikasa intervened.

“Well, I’m glad we cleared that up,” she said, in that cool even tone that suggested we’d been discussing a minor scheduling error.  I stood frozen to the spot as she steered Eren and Armin, who I was too mortified to even think about looking at, away from me and the mess on the floor. I vaguely registered a lunch lady shouting at me, and a brush being pushed into my hands. So there I was. The worst day of my life. Marco stopped nodding, took a sip of his drink.

“At least you tried,” he repeated. “That was you trying, right?”

            The atmosphere at The Cow when I got to work that afternoon couldn’t have been more different than Tuesday’s. For one, Eren didn’t yell at me as soon as I got in the door, which he usually did regardless. I was late, and threw on my uniform without really noticing what I was doing, while Eren remained silent. I almost wanted him to shout at me, call me a name, _something_. I needed bait.

“Guess I’m not as huge an asshole as you thought.” Eren scoffed at this. Almost. More fuel. “Guess you owe me an apology, huh?”

“If you’re waiting for an apology you’re going to be waiting a very long fucking time.”

“Fuck you,” I said, putting the full tip jar back on the counter. He rolled his eyes and shook his head, and the tension seemed to ease a little. We didn’t speak for a long time, almost until closing, which wasn’t that unusual. What was unusual was Eren stopping wiping down the ice cream shield to say:

“You’re an idiot. Turning everything into such a big freaking deal, just to keep a stupid secret. Who does that?”

Ah, yes, my secret. Yep. I like guys. That’s my whole secret. Nothing at all to do with your best friend.

“I’m not the only one keeping secrets,” I said, thinking fast for the first time in at least three days. “Whose car were you getting out of the other day? The big grey one? Sweet ride, but not yours.”

“I…it belongs to my boyfriend. None of your business.” I contained my surprise with difficulty, hoping he was lying. Surely no one in their right mind would date Jaeger. And he hadn’t met my eyes when he said it.  

“Why’d you get out so far from school?”

“Huh? Well, he’s older. I didn’t want…it’s not a big deal,” he said, still not meeting my eyes. I’d never seen Eren get defensive without getting aggressive at the same time before. It was weird. Just then the door jingled. Somehow, I knew who it was before I even looked up. All thoughts on Eren disappeared from my brain. _Don’t turn red_ , I willed myself. _Keep it together Jean_. He was wearing the same blue sweatshirt from the night I’d met him. I realized it was the same color as our plastic spoons, as well as his eyes. Great, now even cutlery was going to remind me of Armin.

“Hey,” said Eren, “what are you doing here? I thought you were going with your grandpa to his foot thing?” Armin turned pink.

“In a little while. I just thought I’d stop by and see how the blender is doing. I brought some spare parts I had lying around, if its giving you trouble.”

“No,” said Eren, looking vaguely bewildered. “It’s fine. I mean yeah it still does the electrocution thing, but there’s nothing for that. Runs smooth though.” The phone rang from inside the break room. “Oh hold on, that’s probably Mike about…well, I’ll get it.” He ran off. Eren offering to get the phone? While Armin was here and everything? Something was going on. But more importantly, I was now alone with Armin for the first time in days.

“Hi,” he said. He gave me a smile in the same way people share secrets. I was definitely turning red, but I think I managed a smile back.

“Hey.”

“So what did you think about that quiz in Algebra? Pretty hard right?”

“We had a quiz? Holy shit I thought that was just a practice worksheet.” I said, going back and trying to remember ever having heard the word quiz. Armin laughed. Maybe he thought I was joking. I wish. “Anyway, it looks like I’m going to need that extra math help,” I said, hoping he remembered offering to tutor me. His eyes lit up.

“Yeah! Definitely! I’ll do my best at least.”

“I think I’m safe in your hands. You’re really good at math.” I was rewarded for the compliment with an even bigger smile.

“How do you know? You’ve only got my word to go on. I might be terrible.”

“Nah,” I said, waving a hand. “No way. I’ve watched you in class. No way anyone could concentrate that hard on numbers and not get good at them.” If Armin thought this was a weird thing to say, he didn’t show it. I mean, he was looking at the floor now, but he was also still smiling. That was good right? He glanced up at me, and I took a second to thank god, my parents, etc. for the height I’d been gifted with, because it was about the cutest damn bullshit I’d ever seen.

“Your ears are crooked,” he said, and reached up to straighten them. I’m not sure what’s intimate about straightening fake cow ears on someone who scoops ice cream to make a living, but there must have been something, because I felt like floating right over the counter Armin was currently leaning against. Marco always said I had a thing about wishing. He said I never did casual daydreams. It was always either all consuming terror, or all consuming longing, and I guess he must have been right because I felt it now. I wanted this every single day, the way I could talk to Armin when Jaeger wasn’t around, the casual gesture. To know him. To know he was coming to The Cow. To look forward to it instead of half dreading it like I did now. I wanted everything so bad, and everything was so far away.   

What happened next was sort of like watching the playback of an especially pastel colored dream. First, the lack of any and all thought besides the knowledge that I had to kiss him right this second or I was never going to kiss him at all. Second, disbelief and confusion at the force I had ended up using. He wasn’t that small. Had I really pulled him, _onto_ the counter? Third, a vague awareness of soft lips, and the taste of fresh mint. And finally, stunned oblivion as Armin landed back on the ground.

“I-” he started but didn’t finish. I recognized the look on his face. It was the same look I’d been wearing hours earlier in the cafeteria, one of absolute horror. Armin turned around, he practically ran from the counter, and the bell on the door was like a death toll as it slammed on his way out.  


	9. An Understanding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "What?"  
> \- Everyone in this fic at almost all times.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thanks for reading, and commenting! The comments I receive on this work are what makes me keep writing it!

_Armin, the Jaeger residence, 12:00 am_

 

“I don’t know what I was thinking! I wasn’t thinking! I was thinking, wow, Jean Kirschtien is attractive even in cow ears, and he told me I’m good at math, which clearly means he wants me to kiss him!”

“Wait, back up. Where were his hands?”

“What? I don’t know. Twisted into my shirt I guess?”

“So he kissed you.” I frowned.

“No, no, I definitely kissed him.”

“Really? Because it sounds a lot like you kissed each other.”

“I-“ I stopped, staring at her, uncomprehending. “Is that…really what happened? You think?” Mikasa nodded yes. “But Jean’s not, he said he wasn’t…” Mikasa shook her head no.

“Armin, you’re supposed to be intelligent. What happened to that?”

“We kissed? We kissed. We…kissed.”

“Yeah. You’re still fucked though.”

“Why?” I asked. But she was at her limit. Her endless calm had met its match against the kind of endless stupidity that can only be produced by having a crush on someone you know you don’t have a chance with.

“Jesus! Where do I even begin!” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end of the timestamps for now!


	10. The Next Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally am I right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you guys know that I had this chapter pretty much done on time at the end of September and then somehow managed to only write approximately ten words a day until October the Seventh!? Did you also know that I finally finished it in a shop in London that only sells grilled cheese sandwiches? In any case, here's the new chapter, sorry I ran over schedule, at least it wasn't a full year late a m I r i g h t ?

“Where’d Armin go?” Eren said as he backed out of the staff room, now carrying a mop and bucket. It was insane how hard I had to fight not to shout: _I just assaulted your best friend over the ice cream counter!_ Instead, I managed to shrug and grunt before slipping into the bathroom. I needed to talk to someone. No, I needed to scream. I needed Marco. I needed to pass away quietly right here in the bathroom. I needed ice cream.

Pretending to flush the toilet and wash my hands, I returned to reality, where Eren was doing a terrible job moping the front of the store. One of the perks of working at The Cow was that we were allowed to eat as much of the ice cream as we wanted. This had sounded almost good enough to make up for having Jaeger as company all the time, but by our third week my excitement had pretty much run out. Turns out, substituting ice cream for dinner really does make you sick, _thanks mom_. I always figured that was just one of those little white lies you told your kids. But as I soon learned, even superman flavor gets old. Today however, I needed it. A lot of it.

            I could tell Eren was watching me as I picked up a “Holy Cow” (read: extra large) cup and tried to make it look as though I usually had four scoops of ice cream before closing. Not long after shoving the first slightly melty spoonful into my face, I looked up and realized he was full on staring, not even trying to be discreet.

“What?” I said. _Let me brain freeze myself into a coma in peace_. He shrugged.

“Nothing.” Then, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, he put down the mop, and joining me behind the counter, started serving himself a large waffle cone. What was happening? Was I in a coma? Had my brain freeze plan succeeded? It seemed like the only good explanation.

“I’m tired of mopping,” he said, all nonchalant, as if we regularly shared an ice cream at the end of a long day. We didn’t speak, just ate in silence as I tried to puzzle out what butterfly effect shit had caused this twilight zone moment. The weirdest thing was, it was actually starting to calm me down. I’ll repeat that. Jaeger’s presence was _calming me down_. This couldn’t last. I’d just physically assaulted Jaeger’s best friend, which he’d probably find out about soon enough, and then he’d run me over with his pickup. End of story. But for now we were eating ice cream together in the empty Cow, as close to camaraderie as we’d ever come.  

“You’re really sweaty,” he said, raising an eyebrow at me. I mean, yeah. I felt like it was qualified. I also felt like Jaeger was still an ass for commenting on it.

“Wow, fucking thanks,” I said. Eren shook his head.

“Jean, you’ll be fine,” he said, looking at his ice cream cone instead of me. Now I was really confused. What did that mean?

“I-“ I started, but Eren cut me off in a rush.

“Trust me, I mean I obviously get it.” He shot me a knowing look, and as what was really happening clicked into place in my brain, I accidentally inhaled half of my spoon. I gagged and spit it out as Eren stared.

_Eren Fucking Jaeger was trying to be supportive of my sexuality._

I took a second to appreciate that this was probably the weirdest sentence I’d ever constructed, either in my head or on paper. He probably thought I was in the middle of some big panic, or possibly even that I’d just figured it out today. This was too much. One the one hand, I could recognize that undergoing this uncomfortable ice cream session for the sake of reassuring me was really damn decent of him. On the other hand, I knew I needed to flee, and flee immediately, or risk throwing up three different colors all over the floor he had just failed to mop.

“I just remembered,” I said, still gasping after my episode with the spoon, “I’ve got to go!”

“Where?” Eren said.

“My mom, I’ve got to…” I trailed off, unable to come up with anything other than _get the fuck away from here_.

“Oh, yeah no, I get it,” he said as I threw off my uniform and practically bolted for the door. What did he get? No, I didn’t want to think about it. The urge to shout the truth at him was growing stronger by the second.

“Stop saying that!” I shouted, just before the door closed behind me. Then I was back on my bike, feeling gross. I’d cheated human decency out of Jaeger. Human decency I really did not want, or quite frankly, deserve.

My home was full of the smell of baking cookies when I reached it, and I grabbed four at once, showing an unusual amount of gratitude towards my bewildered mother. The ice cream had not made me feel better. In fact, it had had the opposite effect, and I was hoping chocolate chips would do a little to calm what nerves I had left. For once, I did not call Marco. I’d been dying to talk to him all night, but when I picked up my phone, I couldn’t bring myself to dial his number. Maybe if few enough people found out about this, I could contain it. I’d just finished being Jean Kirstein: resident homophobe, and didn’t much like the idea of starting tomorrow as Jean Kirstein: resident pervert. As you might expect, I did not have sweet dreams.

When I arrived at school the next morning, sleep deprived and in a terrible mood, I fully expected to be ostracized on first sight. But to my shock and awe, no one seemed to know what had happened. Marco said good morning the same way he always did. Sasha, who had completely forgotten how recently she’d hated me in light of information regarding my sexuality, asked me if she could copy my English homework at lunch. The California state troopers did not burst into the classroom and arrest me. That one was pretty far fetched, but it still qualified as a definite fear. I didn’t see Armin all day. Maybe he wasn’t at school. _Maybe I’d scared him away from school_. I knew I hadn’t just missed him, because I was doing that thing where you don’t want to see someone but you also really want to see them, so you look around constantly, prepared to look away mortified at any second. Then came math. Armin was in school, after all. My brain promptly tore itself in two, one half screaming _look at him_ , and the other screaming, _never look at him ever again_. 

“Jean, you ok?” Marco’s voice seemed to come from a long way away as we took our seats.

“Yearh,” I said. Marco frowned. I guess whatever sound I made didn’t sound enough like ‘yeah’ to do anything but worry Marco further.

“Are you having a stroke?” Much to my relief, class started before I could answer, and when I showed no further symptoms Marco eventually looked away. The frown still stuck to his face told me I’d be getting the full ‘what’s wrong?’ interrogation after school.

            We were learning about conjugates today. I didn’t care. I wanted to turn around and look at Armin. _Don’t do it you dumbass_ , I told myself. I had to look. I couldn’t look. I couldn’t not look. Then, before I could stop myself, I was pretending to stretch a perfectly fine shoulder, leaning slightly to the left, glancing quickly at the very middle desk in the last row. I froze. It was just supposed to be a quick look, but now I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Something truly unprecedented had taken place. Armin wasn’t paying attention. He wasn’t taking notes, or even looking in the direction of the white board. He was looking at me. Really looking, like he had a purpose, a mission. Like he’d looked when I’d met him, and when he’d fixed the blender. I hadn’t been able to figure that look out any of those other times either. I looked away, and back again. He was still looking at me. Looking? Glaring? Glaring might have been a better word for it. He was still cute, but honestly it was kind of scary. I turned all the way back around to face the board, aware that my stretch had gone on about thirty seconds too long. My stomach was a mess for the rest of the period. I felt sure Armin would corner me after class, one way or another, and say…something. But when the bell rang, he was the first one out the door, disappearing around the corner as Eren jogged to catch up, looking just as confused as I felt. Marco opened his mouth to ask me what was wrong, but Sasha found us just as we emerged into the hallway, and I managed to tell him _later_ without saying a word. Best friend perks.

            In any case, I had no idea what was going on, as usual. I was however, starting to get the feeling I was missing something, and I was determined to find out what. I’ll admit that I usually favored letting things play out, taking that good old easy path Jaeger had given me an unfair amount of crap for. Lately though, I’d been taking a disturbing amount of action, and hell, I might as well follow the trend. But where was Armin? What was going through his head? He disappeared for the rest of the day, not with Mikasa and Jaeger at lunch where he usually sat between them, and nowhere in the halls I so thoroughly searched, making myself late to almost everything I had left that day. By final bell, I had lost most, if not all hope. Whatever he was thinking, it sure wasn’t _boy I wish I could talk to Jean._ I figured I might as well try to catch Marco in the parking lot and see if he could drive me home; he was going to call and ask me about my episode in math anyway. I didn’t have work that day, which was all for the best. If I spent time with Jaeger, I might break and ask him about Armin. Or worse, he would try to coach me through coming out again. I couldn’t.

            I walked back through the mostly empty halls, but took the side exit through the gym instead of going straight to the parking lot. The back exit was always packed around this time anyway, and if I went around the tennis courts I made about equal time without getting shoved by a bunch of overeager sweaty people. Watching the ground, trying to sort my head out about what I was going to tell Marco, I was surprised to look up and see that I was about to walk directly into someone else going the opposite direction. I made some sort of vague embarrassingly squeaky noise and sidestepped, directly into a pole. Eyes watering, rubbing my nose where I felt sure I’d broken it, I made out the unmistakable shape of Armin Arlert.

Honestly, it isn’t even worth mentioning the heart attack I had at this point. I was averaging about four heart attacks a day. From now on, if I tell you I saw Armin, just assume I had a heart attack. Great. Back to the present.

“Are you ok?” he said. He wasn’t glaring at me, but he didn’t exactly look happy to see me either. If anything, I’d say he looked a little scared. I felt sick.

“Yeah, I’m fine, I’m okay, I…” that scared look on his face was killing me, “…look, Armin…” I took a deep breath.

_“I’m so sorry!”_

For a second I thought my ears had somehow gotten blocked, because I could have sworn I heard my own words echoed. It took me far too long to register the look of confusion on Armin’s face, and realize we’d both spoken at the exact same time.

“What?” We did it again. I gave a very nervous kind of chuckle; a sound I was sure I had never made before. Lots of those recently.

“Last night. I just wanted to say, I’m sorry,” Armin said in a rush. _Wait, what?_ Surely I’d misheard. Armin was apologizing, to me? It was just like a few weeks ago, when I’d had to apologize for not realizing he’d existed. I’d psyched myself up to say sorry, only to have him beat me to it for reasons I didn’t understand.

“Why are _you_ sorry? I’m the one who…” I hesitated, but I needed to get it out of the way, “I’m the one who assaulted you.”

Then, well, Armin did that thing where he made me feel like if I just took my shoes off I’d probably float right up into space and die of asphyxiation.

He laughed. Then looked horrified about it. Then started to laugh again.

“Sorry,” he said, gasping a little, “that’s what you think happened?”

“That is what happened!” I said, because I’m an idiot who can’t register anything faster than a full minute. Armin was shaking his head back and forth.

“You’re so dumb,” he said. Pure shock on my end. Did Armin just insult me? And then the minute was up, and I got it, right on schedule. If he wasn’t considering me kissing him an assault, that must mean…

“Oh,” I said, “wait, you wanted?” He cut me off.

“I did!” he said, a blush starting in his ears as usual and spreading through his face right down to his collar bones. “I thought you didn’t want-“ I cut him off right back.

“No, I definitely wanted!” An awkward silence descended upon us. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing, or in fact saying. The fact that I was forming coherent sentences at all was quite frankly a miracle.

“Ha, miscommunication,” he said, glancing at me like he was afraid to catch my eye. I on the other hand couldn’t stop staring at him. He was wearing a jacket today, jean, the collar turned up against the wind. It fit him too perfectly. Did people still get clothes tailored? That must be a tailored jacket.

“I don’t know why I did…what I did. I just, hah. I usually have an explanation. But I guess this time the plan was, no plan. Stupid…” he trailed off. The words bounced around my head like I had never had another thought and would never have another again. The plan is no plan. The plan is no plan. Having no plan was, in itself, a plan.

“No, I like it!” I said. “It’s a good plan! I like it, I really like…it.” I finished, lamely. _I really like you_. God, Armin was smart. Armin was so smart. Armin was so weird and so smart and so…close. We were alone together out here by the empty tennis courts. We’d already kissed once. We’d kissed. _We’d kissed_. I repeated the words to myself like they were in another language. One I had definitely never spoken before. I took a step towards him. Then another. He didn’t back away.

“What are you doing?” He said. The _what_ came out loud, but _are you doing_ faded into a whisper as I took one last step, closing the distance between us. I gave that weird nervous chuckle that didn’t belong to me again. This morning I was sure I’d be facing sexual harassment charges by the time I left school. In sixteen years, I’d found that life was usually bitter. You grow up and get used to it. Sometimes though, it could be pretty sweet.

“I don’t know,” I said, truthfully. And then, well, it was lucky he reached for me first, because I was milliseconds from losing every ounce of nerve I’d just mustered up. I was kissing him. But like, _really_ kissing him. What happened last night at The Cow was happening again, only now I recognized it for what it was. I was pulling him towards me, but he was doing a fine job on his own, pulling himself up into me, arms tight around my neck. I’d never been kissed like this, but it was miles beyond pleasant. It was hot. It was also overwhelming. For a terrifying second I actually thought I might pass out. We broke apart.

“Whoa” I said, which was super embarrassing.

“What now?” he said, looking up at me with that determined look, for all intents and purposes as if I was the brains of this operation. Christ, I was barely the feet, let alone the brains.

“I don’t know,” I said again.

“Me neither.” A grin was spreading across Armin’s face. Not the shy smile I was used to by now, this was something different. This was a grin that made me feel like even if I didn’t know now, I might, someday, if I stuck around. I grinned back. I felt less like passing out. Cool. Suddenly the shy smile was back.

“Well, actually, I do have one idea,” he said, looking anywhere but at me.

“What is it?” Armin didn’t reply. Instead he moved his hands to my collar and pressed a soft kiss to my cheek, then the corner of my mouth.

 _Oh yeah. Good idea._ Was this real? Was this making out? Was I making out with Armin Arlert? Whatever. Whatever you called it, it was better than ice cream.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally! We move into phase two! When will their friends find out? H o w will their friends find out? Will there be a special Halloween chapter? Stay tuned.


	11. The Question

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Quietly updates. Hey guys.

The question really on my mind was, why had I ever wasted any time doing anything other than kissing Armin Arlert? It had been a week. One amazing week, since things had started going right. A brand new and terrifying concept if ever there was one. It was Friday, two weeks from Halloween, and things were moving at a dizzying pace. That is to say, I had a boyfriend, and I had made out with that boyfriend approximately twenty times in seven days. Approximately, because I definitely wasn’t keeping track. At least, I thought I had a boyfriend. The word hadn’t actually come up. All I knew was that when we met up, the things I was worried about stopped existing. Like some goddamn love song. We said hi. Then we kissed. Then we talked. Then more kissing, then usually more talking. It was amazing how easy it was to talk, about my life, about his life, about nothing and about everything. But not about the B word, not yet at least. And I was fine with that. With all the sneaking around and meeting in secret, as long as I could keep putting my face on his. And there was a lot of sneaking around. That was another factor in our halfway relationship. Nobody knew about it.

            Today, another glorious Friday, found me pulling Armin into an alley a block from school, thirty minutes before the first bell. It was tiny, around the back of a dingy looking florists, and completely invisible from the main road. It also smelled like a dumpster. Whoever owned this floral shop, they drank a shitload of monster energy, and I definitely smelled weed, which had no place at a florist if they called themselves any kind of gardener. I did not share this brilliant pun with Armin.

“Hi!” I said.

“Hi yourself,” he said. He looked very nice in his usual blue sweatshirt and a pair of faded jeans. When I kissed him, he tasted very faintly of vanilla yogurt, or maybe blueberry. The longer I considered it, the more it kind of grossed me out.  Armin pulled away.

“Do you smell weed?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Does that ruin it as a hiding place?”

“I’m not sure. I mean, it’s completely out of view, so that’s a relatively deciding factor. It should cancel out the smell. However, it’s so out of view, it’s kind of a perfect place to get murdered, honestly. If someone figured out we were stopping here every day, it would be simple to corner us…”

As Armin rambled, I thought about all the other places we’d hidden away this past week. There were a lot of them. Thinking back, I couldn’t really remember how we had started this pattern of meet up make out talk. The sneaking around had come naturally, without either of us really thinking about it. It had been so easy to keep what had happened between us a secret, probably because I was so happy about it. It turns out happiness was really distracting. I hadn’t even said a word to Marco. It had taken a full week, but it was quickly hitting me that it was actually possible to kiss Armin in places that weren’t half cloaked in shadow. Like school. Couples did that didn’t they? If they were really couples, that is. My head was moving far too fast for it’s own good.

“Armin?”

“…so if we’re really thinking of- what?”

“This may be a stupid question.”

“There are no stupid questions,” he said.

 “Cool. You know how we’ve been sneaking around?”

“Yeah, I’m aware Jean,” he said, sounding awfully condescending for someone who just told me there were no stupid questions.

“Is there a reason?”  

Armin opened his mouth, then closed it again, then drew his eyebrows together, which was stupidly cute. I suddenly _really_ wanted everyone to know he’d picked me. Maybe I could make a special guest appearance on the morning announcements. Or maybe I could stand on a lunch table and announce it to the cafeteria. That would be keeping with tradition. When Armin un-furrowed his brow and finally spoke, I was sure he was going to say something similar. Probably smarter than standing on a table and yelling.  

“Eren,” he said, bringing my train of thought to a crashing halt. I had completely forgotten about Jaeger. That was the sort of power Armin had over me. Suddenly I remembered how much else there was. Stuff that still scared me. Telling the world about Armin would mean putting myself out there, something I had been successfully avoiding for my entire teenage life. There would be a lot to face, a lot to figure out. And I would most likely have to spend more time with Jaeger, who, as Armin said, would probably not approve of my tounging his best friend. That would be a whole thing I definitely did not want to deal with. If it were just the two of us, we were safe.

“Right,” I said.

“Although,” Armin said, “Mikasa knows.” I found I was only a little surprised. It hardly mattered. If anyone looked like they could keep a secret, it was her. Processing this information, a new thought struck me.

“If Mikasa knows, can I tell Marco?”

“She doesn’t know everything,” Armin said quickly, “only that we kissed at The Cow, and…” he sighed, “…that I had a crush on you for about a million years. Stop smiling!” I couldn’t help it.

“But Marco?” I said, “he’d never tell if I asked him not to.” I didn’t want to say out loud how important it was to me to be able to tell Marco about this. I’d never have gotten this far without him. I’d still be picking out my shirt the morning of Armin and I’s first not date. Sometimes I wondered if I would have even made it to this point _alive_ without Marco.  It must have showed on my face anyway, because Armin gave me a smile. The really good kind that lit him up in ways I couldn’t figure out.

“Yes, of course you can tell him.” It occurred to me that as long as we were in these waters, now was a good time to bring up the thing that had been on the edge of my mind for a week. The thing we hadn’t talked about. Ignoring of course the fact that we hadn’t really talked about anything in the realm of relationships. In my defense, the plan was in fact supposed to be no plan.

“What should I tell him though?” I asked tentatively. Armin frowned.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what am I supposed to say?”

“Say whatever you want. Just tell him about us.”

Honestly, this was the most nerve-wracking conversation I’d had in years. Possibly ever. I hated it a little, especially because I thought it should have been easy. I like you, you like me. Dating. Boyfriend. Happy ever after. As we’d already discussed however, life wasn’t that simple.

I changed tactics.

“Let’s go on a date.”

“A date?”

“Yeah,” I said, “we should. A real one. Right?” I registered that I was shouting a little, and looked around in case anyone headed to school decided to investigate the noise. Armin was suddenly very quite, and my heart jumped into my throat.

“But if you don’t want…”

“No, no!” Armin started, “I think it’s a great idea. Let’s go on a date.”  For some reason, getting Armin to agree to a real date with me felt like a bigger win than all the kissing. I knew right then where I would take him. It would only be slightly less weird than talking in a tree for a few hours, and there was no chance of anyone finding us there.

“Ok, finish all your homework tomorrow. Then meet me on Sunday night. I’ll text you where to go.”

“I always finish my homework by Saturday. Usually on Friday night if I can manage.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” I said, “is it a date?”

“It’s a date,” he said.

“Good,” I said, “and I’ll tell Marco today. That we’re…”

“Together,” Armin finished for me. The heart that was still in my throat swelled. Trust Armin to find the perfect way of putting it. Together. Still confused about a lot of things. Probably going about this all wrong. But in it together. That felt right.

—

These were the words I knew I would use to tell Marco the news. Armin and I are together now. Or did that sound too formal? I was weirdly nervous, like I was about to tell my mom about my first kiss _which I definitely did not do_. I wanted him to know more than anything, but I also didn’t want him to make it into a big deal. It would be great if I could mention it in passing, Marco playing it off like he had known all along. But fate was not so kind.

            I planned on waiting until after school, maybe asking for a ride to work so we would have time to talk privately. Marco was already in his seat when I entered first period biology, and I gave him my most casual greeting.

“Sup?” I said as I took my seat. Marco’s eyes widened.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“What? Nothing!”

“What happened?” he said, insistent. I couldn’t believe it. Apparently Marco could read minds now.

“How the hell do you do that?” I said.

“Seriously? You’re easier to read than shampoo instructions.” I was a little annoyed at this, and still not totally discounting mind reading powers as a theory. Still, the seats around us were beginning to fill up, so I gave in and whispered:

“I’ll tell you at lunch.”

Marco nodded, then spent the next three hours glancing at me during class. I suspected he was trying to read my mood, prepare himself to offer one type of advice or another about whatever I had to tell him. Finally, the lunch bell rang. Marco didn’t even let me make it to the cafeteria before pushing me into the library.

“Why here?” I asked, as he hustled me into a protected corner at the back of the science section.

“So you can whisper without seeming suspicious,” said Marco. I really didn’t give him enough credit half the time. “What’s up?” he said. I was embarrassed all of a sudden, but Marco looked like he might hit me if I tried to tell him to forget it. I forced the words out.

“It’s about Armin.”

“What about him?” A beat passed.

“Well, we’re together,” I said quickly.

Marco punched me. I mean, Marco physically punched me. Hard. Not quite in the face, but damn near it. I stumbled back into the shelf, making it tremble.

“What the hell man?” I said, in a sort of scream whisper that I hoped didn’t carry. Marco was staring at his hands, expression blank.

“I don’t know! That was the last thing I expected you to say. Jesus Jean the last I heard you’d barely convinced him you weren’t a raging homophobe!”

“I know, I know!  A lot happened right after that. Listen…” As I explained the long string of events that had led up to now, the shock faded from and returned to Marco’s face periodically. When I was done, lunch hour was half over. “Sorry I waited to tell you.”

“No, I get it,” he said, nodding slowly. “When is everyone else going to find out? This is pretty big for you. Honestly I never thought I’d see the day.” Marco grinned at me, knowing I couldn’t yell at him properly in the library.

“Shut up. I don’t know. We’re going on a date on Sunday, but it’s a secret.”

“But like, is he your boyfriend?”

“I don’t know. It feels like it? I don’t want to be pushy though, I’m just going to let things play out. See what happens.” Suddenly Marco had the same look he’d had on his face right before he hit me, and I flinched when he reached forward to grab me hard by the shoulders. He looked into my eyes, and shook gently.

“Jean. Tell him you want to be a couple. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t fuck this up. Make it clear you want to date him. What’s for lunch today?”

“What?” I said, thrown by this change of topic. “I think it’s tacos?”

“Great,” said Marco, clapping me on the back once before releasing me, “let’s go, I’m starving.”  

            It felt great to tell Marco what had happened. Unfortunately, telling one person made me want to tell another, and ten more after that. That evening at work, I found myself staring too long at Jaeger. _I made out with your best friend this morning_ , I thought to myself. I grinned as I went back to wiping down the tables.

            When I got home that evening, I thought about Marco’s advice. The way he’d given me no time to argue made me think he really wanted me to take it. Obviously I wanted to date Armin. I’d asked him on a date hadn’t I? Did it really need to be said? My normal head voice said no. A smaller voice that sounded like it had freckles told me I was being an idiot. Still, I heard this voice a lot, and had spent years perfecting the art of ignoring it. Armin and I messaged throughout the weekend, though admittedly half of them we’re about Algebra homework I didn’t get along with. Finally, on Sunday, I texted him in the afternoon.

_Meet me at 127 Grove Avenue in an hour._

_What should I wear?_

_Normal clothes?_

_Ok_

I left immediately and sat in the dingy entrance room, a half hour early. I hoped I’d made the right choice with this place. It wasn’t exactly classy. Thoughts about Armin and Marco and Eren and School and Boyfriend clouded my head until I was barely seeing the bright purple carpet I’d been staring at as I waited. Then the bell above the door jingled, and my head cleared as I looked up. As usual, it was hard to remember what I was worried about once Armin was there, looking so cute it was like he’d walked out of a Disney movie. His t-shirt was light pink and kind of flow-y, only adding to the image I now had of someone drawing him into life using pastels.

“I can see why you chose this place,” he said, smiling, eyebrows half raised, “not only is it basically past city limits, but it looks like no one’s been inside in about 100 years.” I had brought Armin to this arcade for both reasons, as they ensured total privacy, something I hoped he’d picked up on. As stated, I was aware that Paradis Discount Arcade, defying all reason by remaining open despite clear health code violations and lack of visitors, was not ideal first real date material. However, I had fond memories of the place. My best friend before Marco and I had found it riding our bikes around past curfew. Our town was no metropolis, but it was big enough that being this far out alone was half frightening, half thrilling. After our discovery, we’d taken to it not in spite of, but because of it’s utter emptiness. At ten years old, feeling like you own an arcade is a powerful emotion. I hadn’t been here in about six years, but was not completely surprised when I called on Friday and found it was still in operation.

“I know,” I said, “it’s awful. It shouldn’t be open and I’m half sure it’s some sort of front for a huge conspiracy. But it’s empty. Want to go in?” Armin grinned at me.

“It’s ok. I love arcades. I’m ready.”

We entered and headed to the counter, where an old man was hunched over a paperback novel. He looked unsurprised to see customers, even though the place was, as I’d guessed, completely empty. I couldn’t remember if he’d worked here when I’d come as a kid, but something told me there was no way he hadn’t. His nametag told me his name was Fritz.

“Hi. Twenty dollars worth of tokens?” Fritz nodded and bent below the counter.

“Twenty dollars worth?” Armin said.

“I have a job remember? I’m made of money,” I lied. If I couldn’t take Armin anywhere fancy, or well, public, I was at least going to splash out and make sure we could stay playing games at the crappy arcade I’d chosen for as long as we wanted. Fritz deposited the tokens into my outstretched hands, and I handed half to Armin. Some had little swords on them, others tiny crowns.

“I’ll show you around,” I said, as Fritz went back to his paperback.

            The Paradis Arcade had a strange combination of attractions. There was a Zoltar fortune telling machine, two skeeball sets, approximately twenty-five different dated fighting games, and exactly one shiny new first person shooter. This, which had not been a feature when I’d frequented the place, would turn out to be a highlight. But I wanted to start small. I led Armin to the skeeball.

“Are you any good?” he asked. At one token per game, this was the cheapest thing in here. I’d spent the better part of age ten perfecting my technique.

“Watch and learn,” I said, inserting a token. I played a pretty decent game. My skill had diminished in the six years I’d been away, but I still managed not to throw away any balls. Armin applauded at each particularly good throw, and cheered when I scored 60 on my final roll. I felt like the best skeeball player in the world. His pink cheeks matched his shirt. I felt very warm.

“Want to give it a go?” I asked.

“Yeah, move over.” Armin was smiling like a kid as he inserted a token and took his first ball. I thought about teaching him the proper technique by putting my arms around his, just like in the movies. That would be so cute. Before I could act on this thought, Armin did something very strange with his wrist. I wasn’t super sure the ball touched the track at all as suddenly, it was sinking neatly into the upper left hole. 100 points, first throw. I gaped at the hole, then at Armin, who was looking at me with a fire in his eyes almost like the one I now knew took over him when he was determined. Except this fire wasn’t just bright. It burned. Pastel Armin was dead. Skeeball Armin had murdered him with a well aimed skeeball.

“You don’t have to be super strong to be good at arcade games,” he said, raising an eyebrow and looking a little insane. “I really love arcades.”

            What followed was nothing less than a fucking massacre. After playing three more nearly perfect rounds of skeeball, Armin dragged me to the fighting games, where he kicked my ass repeatedly. I won one, and it was because he sneezed at the exact wrong moment.

_“I sneezed Jean, I want a re-match.”_

_“You can’t take this victory away from me.”_

I thought we had come here to play cute games together, but the longer we stayed, the more it became clear Armin saw it as a full on competition. The new first person shooter was a team game, where your goal was to rescue a hostage crew from an alien starship. We had barely started when Armin shot me in the head.

“It’s a team game!”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t even know you could shoot your teammates in games like these.”

As I stared at him, shaking my head, he started to laugh. I tried to reconcile my image of him as a Disney character and this new, bloodthirsty version before me. I couldn’t, but it didn’t matter, because I _loved_ this version. I was so glad I had picked this place. We played the team game a few more times, and I let Armin run ahead shooting all the aliens before swooping in to grab the hostages. I was shouting nonsense as we made our escape. Armin was laughing maniacally. It was the best first date ever.

            When we’d exhausted ourselves, we collapsed into a small booth in the equally small refreshments corner. To call it a food court would have been too much of a stretch. Armin insisted on buying us both something, and I insisted on two cokes only, because the pizza sitting in the display case looked, like Fritz, as if it might have been sitting there since I’d last been. As I sipped, Armin told me about Eren’s rage over his superiority in all things video and arcade game.

“But I say it’s fair, because he’s better at everything else.” I nearly inhaled my straw. Better at everything else?

“What? Armin, you’re far superior to Eren. In like, every way.”

“Ha. Thanks,” he said, looking away in a way that told me he clearly didn’t believe it. I was just forming a coherent thought when out of nowhere Marco’s advice hit me like a ton of bricks. Just like when I’d had to kiss him, I knew I had to say it right now or I was never going to.

“I want to be your boyfriend.” Armin’s eyes shot back to me.

“What?”

“You heard me,” I said, really hoping he had, because I was way too embarrassed to say it again. Armin said nothing. The air between us was so quiet, I heard my heart sink to my knees.

“I totally understand though, if that’s not what you want.” I saw Armin squeeze his cup so hard it was a miracle coke didn’t come shooting up out of the straw.

“No! Jean, this is probably the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever said, but I’ve been imagining you saying those exact words for three years.” The full impact of this statement wouldn’t hit me until I was lying in bed that night. In the moment, I was half relieved, half confused.

“Oh,” I said, “So then, you do want me to be your boyfriend? I just want to make sure it’s all really clear. We haven’t really talked about it, and I think we were supposed to? I mean, I kind of assumed, since we like each other. And all the kissing.” Armin half laughed. Then his expression fell.

“I should have said something,” he said.

“I should have said something too,” I said, “it’s ok.” Armin bit his lip.

“I knew we should talk about it. I was avoiding it.”

“Oh,” I said again. A little less relieved. A little more confused.

“I just,” he paused, “I’ve been worried. That’s why I didn’t want to say anything that would nail it down.”

“Worried about what?” I said. I suspected the answer was obvious, and I was being dense as usual. Marco was really getting to me.

“I don’t know. Everything just happened so fast. And it was like a dream, really! But it was like it was too good to be true. You didn’t notice me for three years, and suddenly it was all coming together too easily. I wasn’t sure you were all in. I didn’t want to embarrass myself.”

I wanted to take this opportunity to remind Armin that in my pursuit of his affection, I’d become the school bigot and announced my sexuality to the entire cafeteria in the space of twenty-four hours, but some of the things he’d just said required immediate response. I got up and moved to his side of the booth, where I sat down and moved him by the shoulders until we were on eye level. Then the words were coming out of my mouth so fast I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop them.

“I don’t know how I missed you all this time. Everyone keeps telling me I’m an idiot, but I never listened until I found out I could have known you freshman year. Now that I’ve found you, I promise you I am completely and 100% sure I want to stick with you. I am all in. I never say stuff like that. I hate being all in, honestly. I’d rather play it safe. Maybe 30% in. But for you I am all in.” I shut myself up then, but I didn’t have long to be embarrassed before Armin attacked me. As he tightened his arms around my neck, I wondered if old Fritz would come break us up. The thought was mortifying, and I pulled away reluctantly.

“So, do I have a boyfriend?”

“Yes! Wait! Ask me one more time.” I narrowed my eyes at him.

“Is this some weird power trip?”

“Three years Jean. Three years.”

I asked him again. Then once more. Then he said yes.

—

            Now that everything was official (a fact that took a full day to sink in and another three to be able to think about without grinning like an idiot) I was determined to make up for those three years of neglect. I took Armin on three more dates in the span of a week. By the third, I felt like we’d been dating for years. Like I’d known this kid for a lifetime. Possibly more than one. Of course, it was difficult to find deserted places to have halfway fun dates, so date number three found us in my room after school. Mom was at work, and Armin was curled up in a ball next to me on the bed.

“When you said study,” I said, looking up from my Algebra textbook, “I kind of thought that was like, innuendo.”

“Algebra is your worst subject,” Armin said, not taking his eyes off his own homework. “Besides, if Eren asks, I can truthfully tell him I was tutoring you.” I watched him work for a moment, thinking. I really didn’t want to bring up the subject I was about to bring up.

            “Armin?”

            “Hmm?”

            “You know how we’re secretly dating?”

            “Mhhm.”

“And we agree that’s the best thing for the time being. Us against the world.” I loved saying that. Armin didn’t respond. He was doing math with a brain surgeon level of concentration. “You know there’s going to be an after the time being right? Eren’s going to know eventually. Probably.” I considered for a second a future where somehow, Armin and I got married and grew old together, without Eren or anyone else finding out, and we got away with never having to have that particular conversation. Armin looked up.

“Yeah, I know. I’m really happy with this right now though.”

“Me too.”

“I will tell him eventually. Obviously, I’ll have to. But listen, Eren can’t know. Not before he hears it from me. Promise me.” I made a face.

“Jesus. I’m definitely not going to tell him. It’s a promise.” A small part of me wondered why it was so difficult for Armin to tell Eren about us. I had a feeling if I thought too hard about it, I’d break something. I pushed it aside.

            October was getting on, the days getting shorter, the customers at the cow becoming fewer. Hange said it was always this way. We slowed down as it started to get cold, then for some reason, came back full swing right before Thanksgiving. I didn’t mind. Boring shifts were less boring now I had Armin to think about. The Monday before Halloween, Eren missed another unexplained day of work, while the next day brought another pleasant surprise. Reiner caught up to me and Marco in the hall on our way to Algebra.

“Hey. You guys have Halloween plans?”

“Do we?” said Marco. Reiner took my silence for an answer.

“You do now. 9 P.M., my house on Friday. It’s a costume party. That’s non-optional.” It sounded less like an invitation and more like a threat. Still, Reiner’s parties were legendary.

“Sounds good,” said Marco. Reiner gave us the thumbs up and ran off to threaten Thomas into attendance. “You going to go? No offence, but if you say no I’m going without you. I had to miss Reiner’s last party. You know, the one with the chandelier thing? I’m not missing this one.” Marco said.

“Probably,” I said. Honestly, I’d been thinking about asking Armin to see a horror double feature with me in a theater one town over. But an invitation like this was hard to pass up. I would never forget witnessing with my own two eyes what Marco so delicately referred to as ‘the chandelier thing.’ I brought it up after school, in the monster weed alley Armin and I had come to frequent.

“Yeah, I got invited too. Reiner’s a really nice guy isn’t he? I think a lot of people just invite Eren and assume I’ll come along.”

“You’re going then! Great!” I said, unable to contain my excitement. There was a moment there a few weeks ago during the Jean’s a Bigot misunderstanding when I thought I’d never be invited to another party again, let alone one of Reiner’s. Armin smiled.

“Yeah I’m going. But you know, we can’t go together. And it’ll be weird pretending we’re casual friends when we’ve spent so much time together lately.”

“That’s true.” It would be weird. I would have to be sure not to get too drunk and accidentally let something slip. I wouldn’t be able to touch Armin at all, which would be no fun. But this was one of _Reiner’s parties_.

“But hey,” I said, “what’s one night of just friends? We can do that. And,” I said, a brilliant idea coming to me, “we can sneak off halfway through and meet up somewhere. Make up for the time we lost partying. That sounds like the best night ever.”

“It does,” said Armin. I pushed him gently against the side of the very romantic dumpster. I still thought it was a miracle I got to kiss him at all, even if it was in an alley that smelled like drugs and garbage. Armin put his hands on my waist, then hooked his fingers into my belt loops and pulled me closer. I couldn’t smell the dumpster at all while we were kissing, especially as he continued to pull on my belt loops. It made me slightly dizzy. Amongst other things. It really was going to be difficult to pretend I had no interest in him at Reiner’s party. As if he’d suddenly gained Marco’s mindreading powers, Armin broke the kiss and nodded at me.

“Just friends at the party,” he said.  

“Yeah,” I said. “But its only one night. Only a few hours really. How hard could it be?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh Jean. Ohhhhh Jean.


	12. A Good Idea, A Bad Idea

_Armin_

 

“So,” I started. Mikasa was hanging off the end of her bed, reading a book upside down. She sat up in one fluid motion to listen to the rest of my question, and I had to marvel at her core strength. She must go to Eren’s gym. There must be some sort of family discount that let her go at least five days a week or…

“What?” she asked.

“Were you invited to Reiner’s Halloween party?” She gave me a look. Right. It was easy to forget that Mikasa was no longer just the little kid who didn’t say much and hit anyone who picked on me. She was a hot girl in high school. Of course she was invited to the party.

“Yeah, I’ll be there,” said Mikasa. “Will you?”

“Yeah, I…I thought I’d go for once. Just to see what all the fuss it about.”

If she was surprised, she didn’t show it.

“So what are you going as?”

“Going as?” I asked.

“Your costume. It’s a costume party. You know Reiner will kick your ass if you don’t wear one.” I hadn’t given it any thought. I’d been trick or treating with Eren and Mikasa when we were younger, but I’d never been much for the holiday.

“Do you have anything I could wear?” She gave me a look.

“Do you want to go in tight leather? Cat Woman from last year would probably fit you.”

“Obviously not.”  

“I bet Kirstein would appreciate it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, trying to keep my voice lofty. Mikasa sighed.

“Whatever. I might have some old stuff you could turn into a costume.” She got up and disappeared into the hall. I squeezed the satin throw pillow I’d been holding, trying not to think too hard about her tight leather suggestion. When she reappeared she was carrying a plastic container full of costume jewelry and ratty looking wigs. She put it down on the bed and began to rifle through the contents.

“No…no…” she said, throwing aside a pair of long white gloves and a broken plastic cutlass. “Wait, this is perfect.” Before I could stop her, she’d pushed a pair of glittery red devil horns onto me. “And here’s your pitchfork.” She handed me a shiny black plastic version, no bigger than a child’s fairy wand. I was about to say _no way_ , but I actually kind of liked it. The low effort nature of the costume was also a large factor.

“You like it don’t you?” It was my turn to sigh.

“It’ll do.”

“Now all you’ll have to do is wear red, and…and…” she stopped, staring at me like she was only just seeing me there in her room. Then an evil sort of smile was spreading across her usually placid face. It was very disarming.

“And what? Mikasa, you’re scaring me.”

“I know _exactly_ what else you should wear.”


	13. The Party: Part One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Halloween Chapter! I won't even make a joke about how long this has been coming. Shhhh its October not July. Anyway, this chapter ended up massive, so I've turned it into two parts. Part two goes up sometime this week! Trust me. I am great at updating consistently.
> 
> (Just now realized I'm an idiot and there was an old draft of chapter 14 stuck on to the end of this one. I've fixed it now, but sorry to anyone who was previously confused!)

_Jean_

 

Armin and I planned it all very carefully. Well, Armin planned it very carefully, with some input from yours truly. We were going to spend a while at Reiner’s, long enough so everyone could get tipsy, just drunk enough to not miss us when we slipped away. Separately, obviously. Fifteen minutes later, Armin would be letting me in his mercifully first story window, and we’d have the most time we’d had to ourselves…well, ever. The whole night if we wanted it. The implications of this fact were not lost on me, but first I wanted to focus on getting to the party, through the party, and out of the party. Three simple steps.

            Armin called as I was putting the final touches on my costume, an hour before my preplanned, fashionably late arrival.

“Hey, everything ok?” he asked, no preamble. I nodded, like an idiot.

“All going to plan,” I said. Silence on the line. “Armin? You there?”

“Sorry,” he said, clearly picking up the phone again, “Mikasa’s been trying to…but she’s insane if she thinks…Mikasa, forget it! I said forget it! No!” I frowned at the phone. I wondered how much Armin had told her since that first disastrous kiss. He hadn’t said anything. Did she know about us? About the plan? Would she help?   

“Jean?” It seemed I finally had Armin’s full attention.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“Listen, I have intel,” I laughed.

“Intel? I didn’t realize we were planning on assassinating someone at this thing. Is it Jaeger? Please say it’s Jaeger.”

“I’m serious! Reiner’s made punch. He’s calling it Brian Biter. Berthold was there when he put it together. He told Sasha who told Mikasa who told me.”

“Typical Reiner. Does he even need a fake ID? He looks about thirty.”

“Jean.”

“Fifty if he’d grow a beard. Berthold might kill him though.”

“Jean, you’re not listening.

“So what’s in this punch?” Armin didn’t say. Instead, his voice got very serious.

“Jean, don’t drink the punch.”

“What?”

“If you want to be able to leave the party on two legs at all let alone walk ten blocks and crawl through a window, don’t drink the punch. Not even a sip ok?”

“Jesus Christ, what’s in it?”

“Just trust me.” I nodded again.

“Ok, no punch. No problem.”

“Good, I’ll see you soon.” He hung up, and I went back to fixing my costume, only a tiny bit more nervous than I had been before he’d called. Going to look at myself in the full length bathroom mirror calmed these nerves, if only for a moment. Jaeger, Marco, most people I knew in fact, would have called this egotistical, but I really didn’t care. The truth was, I loved Halloween. When my parents were still together, my mom made my costume every year. Now, I was sure she was great at her current job of being a dental technician, but I knew her real calling was fashion. The stuff she came up with was miles beyond what any of the other parents could buy at party city, and it showed. When I wore her costumes, I wasn’t just dressing up. I _was_ batman. I _was_ wolverine. I _was_ the hulk. For like, three weeks actually. The green body paint she got her hands on was professional grade. We had to go to west Hollywood just to find someone who had the right stuff to get it off. When my dad moved out and she had to start working longer hours, I started making them myself. They weren’t mom’s, not even now, after years of practice, but they were still miles past party city. This year, I’d decided to go sort of low key. I’d initially planned being something that involved wings, before I realized I’d have to fit through a window wearing it. I gave my hair a final slick back, grinning in spite of myself. Dying your own hair on the night of a party was a dangerous game to play, but goddamn I’d done it. I threw the empty tube of hair gel in the trash like I was scoring a touchdown, and went to get my things together for what promised to be an eventful evening.

            Reiner’s house was fucking packed. I could tell before I stepped in the door, before I could even see the house. I could hear the music from a goddamn block away. Reiner lived in one of those houses I couldn’t even imagine living in, with three tv rooms and porcelain vases and a refrigerator bigger than my bathroom. I marveled at it a little before letting myself in, not bothering with the doorbell. At least no one had spilled out onto the yard yet.

The first thing I saw upon entering was the infamous punch. It was blood red, and I swear there was enough of it to fill a child’s swimming pool. Before I could register anything else, two people crashed into me, one right after the other.

“Jean! You look like a fucking prick!”

“Thanks Connie,” I wheezed, struggling not to collapse as Connie let his whole weight hang around my neck, while Sasha clung ape-like to my back. “Now get the fuck off, I worked hard on this jacket and if you ruin it thirty seconds into the party I swear.” They both let go at once, crashing to the floor in fits of laughter. Jesus, what on earth was in that punch? I fully appreciated Armin’s warning for the first time.

“What are you supposed to be anyway?”

“Isn’t it obvious,” said Sasha, before I could answer. She took a deep breath, and I knew she was about to start singing. This was the one downside to my otherwise brilliant costume. I would, under no circumstances, be performing any duets tonight.

“No singing,” I said sternly, and she let the deep breath she had just taken go in another peal of drunken laughter. Connie pulled Sasha to her feet, then under his arm, and she slipped a hand into his back pocket. I felt a pang of jealousy. What would it be like if Armin and I could’ve come together, as a couple? God, he’d make an attractive pink lady.

“I’ll see you around ok?” I said, spotting an excellent opportunity. A big group had just come through the door, and Reiner, who was standing behind the punch forcing every new entrant to take a glass, was distracted. I slipped by unnoticed into the living room, having escaped the punch, and hoping I might find Armin on a couch somewhere.

Unfortunately, within seconds of entering, I was greeted with the opposite of Armin. An extremely drunk Eren hit me hard from the left, and unlike Connie and Sasha, this crash was less than friendly.

“You! I swear, you…” Eren leaned back, and for a fraction of a second I thought he was going to throw a punch. Instead, he threw a hand onto my shoulder, clapping it hard. He was really far gone, and I decided to push my luck.

“Where’s this rich older boyfriend of yours? Didn’t bring him?”

“You think he wants to hang out at some high school party? I wouldn’t ask him to come here if you paid me.” Coming from Mr. Two Jobs Work Ethic Jaeger, this was saying something. I was half hoping drunk Eren would admit he was lying about having a nice car owning, older boyfriend at all. The thought was still very unsettling. “Besides, I’m headed to his apartment after this.” The smug smile on Eren’s face made me feel a little sick. I comforted myself with the thought that even if he made it to the apartment, he’d probably just spend the rest of the night being sick into this poor guy’s toilet. 

I really wanted to ask him where Armin was. Maybe, if he was drunk enough, he wouldn’t think it was a weird question for me to ask, wouldn’t even remember it, maybe. Then I remembered the look on Armin’s face as he’d made me promise. _Eren can’t know. Not before he hears it from me. Promise._ In a show of what I refused to admit was anything but deep caring for Armin, I took a second to check Eren’s jacket pockets for his keys. If he tried to get in his car like this, he’d never make it to tomorrow let alone his boyfriend’s place. Armin might be vaguely upset if he wrapped himself around a tree. Once I was sure he was key-less, I let Eren stumble away, telling myself I would find Armin eventually, that he was probably looking for me too. Still, it was a big house. I started doing the rounds, up and downstairs, trying not to look as if I were searching for someone. I knew I’d have to wait to kiss him, hold him, even put an arm around his shoulders, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to see him. Check in, confirm our estimated departure time, etc. I wanted everything to go right tonight. As I was about to head downstairs for a third time, I saw her. Mikasa had just walked out of what I thought was a bathroom, parting the small crowd clogging the hallway as she went. She looked great, in a fem Indiana Jones sort of getup. Not at great as me, but still, pretty great. More than a few boys were eyeing her, and it was bizarre to think that a few months ago I would have been one of them. She saw me, and stopped, narrowing her eyes. They were a little glassy, and I wondered if she didn’t recognize me with all the hair and the leather. Then, she did something she’d definitely never done before. She smiled at me. I checked over my shoulder quickly, but there was no one there. I blinked, unsure of how to proceed. Mikasa smiling at me was unprecedented. There was something a little off about it too, the smile. It wasn’t exactly friendly. It looked almost smug. Like she was satisfied about something. But then, someone else followed her out of the bathroom, and I promptly stopped giving a shit. Armin was wearing what I was one hundred percent sure was one of Mikasa’s crop tops. It was bright red, matching the horns placed a little lopsided on top of his usually angelic head. I didn’t know who’s shorts he was wearing, but I prayed against every odd that they were his, because I needed him to be wearing them every day for the rest of his life. High waisted, jean, cut off dangerously high, they were doing something very dangerous to me, more dangerous than dying my own hair, something that had me considering leaving the party for his house not just early, but right fucking now. As if this wasn’t enough, he was wearing some sort of makeup, maybe just around the eyes, but had his lips always been so full and shiny?  There was something else too. Something about the way he lit up when he saw me, the way he walked over, smiled at me, reached out to touch me when he finally got close enough. I grabbed his hand midair, in what I hoped came off as some sort of weird secret handshake, painfully aware of the amount of people around us.

“What was that for?” he said, giving me a pout that would have put me in the ground if not for the issue at hand.

“Holy shit,” I said, as he gave up on his pout and giggled. “You’re wasted.”

 

 

 


	14. The Party: Part Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Its here! Part Two! If you’re thinking, what’s with all this hinting at Eren and Mikasa’s home life? Is that ever going to come in? The answer is: All in good time friends.

_Armin_

As soon as I hung up on Jean, I turned to glare at Mikasa.

“Come on. Don’t look at me like that. You know you want to. It’s the first party you’ve been to in years. Don’t you want to do something dramatic?”

“I don’t! I’ll feel…no!”

“I’ve never even worn them!” She protested.

“I’m fully aware of that. Just drop it ok? Please.” I don’t know what Mikasa heard in my voice then, but it was enough to make her take me seriously.

“Ok, ok. I’m sorry. I’m going to go get ready.”

“Wait,” I said, making up my mind, “I’m not touching the rage drawer, but will you do my makeup?”

“Sure,” she said, “full on?”

“Something subtle please,” I said, blushing. One day, bored out of our minds while Eren was visiting his dad, Mikasa had attacked my face with every brush bottle and blender she owned. The results were frightening.

“Ok, give me a second.” She rushed off to her room. When she returned, she brought a disgruntled Eren with her, sandwich in hand.

“Mikasa’s making me eat,” he said, throwing himself down on the bed as Mikasa put the makeup she’d chosen for me on my little dressing table, motioning for me to sit on the chair.

“You need to line your stomach if you don’t want to go to the hospital tonight.”

“What if I want to go to the hospital tonight?”

“Don’t be stupid.” Eren rolled his eyes but took a bite anyway. Mikasa began to pull soft red pencil eyeliner over my eyelids.

“Ow.”

“Stay still.”

A half hour later, I was admiring her handiwork as she and Eren went to finally don their own outfits. It was a little less subtle than I’d initially had in mind, but still nice. I wished I was brave enough to wear even a little brown eyeliner on a day that wasn’t Halloween. Jean wouldn’t tell me what he was coming as, only that he was going subtle this year. He loved this holiday, and I found myself hoping my costume was up to scratch. In any case, I was excited to see what he’d put together. I smiled to myself, which made my ears go red, which made my face flush, which was really embarrassing. God, how was I going to make it through the night? I shook my head and went to grab my bag, spurred by the sound of Eren slamming the upstairs bathroom door shut behind him. Time to go. Before I turned off the lights, I spent a second too long considering my bed. How, in a few hours, Jean would be on it. In it?

“Armin! Let’s go!” Eren shouted from the stairs. I flipped the lights, and slammed the door shut.

We were incredibly early. Eren always did this, even after Mikasa had explained the concept of ‘fashionably late’ around ten thousand times. Whether it was a birthday party, a house party, or a sleepover, Eren was there five minutes before the given starting time. Reiner’s house was completely empty except for him and Bertholdt, but he didn’t seem to mind us being there.

“Jesus. How many people are you expecting?” Eren asked, eyeing the four storage tubs full of red liquid Reiner had set up near the door.

“I’m not sure. You think I made enough?” Enough? _Enough?_

“Looks like it,” said Mikasa, as calm as ever.

“What does it taste like?” said Eren.

“Don’t know,” said Reiner, “I’m not drinking tonight.”

“Not drinking?” Eren sounded like he’d never realized the concept was possible.

“Someone’s got to make sure the house doesn’t burn down. I know its good though, Bert was my taste tester. He’s laying down upstairs. Should be ok by the time most people show up.”

“Need help with anything?” Mikasa asked. Reiner waved a hand at her.

“Course not. You’re my guests. Don’t lift a finger.”

Just then, someone appeared at the top of the stairs. Bertholdt, wrapped in a blanket, eyes slightly unfocused. He swayed a little and steadied himself on the wall. I was very glad I’d warned Jean about the punch.

“I never finished unwrapping the cups. Or putting out the cups. Or the lights in the backyard. So you do need help.”

“Lord,” said Reiner, “go back to bed.” Berdholdt nodded and disappeared again. He turned back to us. “About the not lifting a finger…”

“We don’t mind,” said Eren. In the end he and Mikasa went to sort out the lights, while Reiner and I dealt with the cups.

To this very day, I’m not entirely sure what happened. I’d heard the phrase, ‘it was all a blur’ before, but I’d never actually experienced it until that night. We were opening and stacking cups in the kitchen when Reiner took one off the top of the stack and went to rifle in his refrigerator. He emerged with a jug of something bright red.

“I thought you weren’t drinking?” I said as he poured.

“I’m not,” he said, giving me a quick wink, “but you know Sasha will bully me if I don’t have something in my hand. I made a decoy jug, just for me.” Reiner was big and good at sports, but this did not mean he was not a smart man.

“I wasn’t really planning on drinking tonight either,” I admitted, stacking a few cups in a weird pyramid I had noticed Jean doing with the ice cream cups at The Cow. It was weirdly easy to talk to Reiner, despite our outward differences. He was such a decent guy.

“I had a feeling you’d say that,” he said. “Listen, I made a few of these. You want in?”

“What? Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” he said, waving a ‘no big deal’ hand. “You probably weren’t going to drink anything at all, am I right? You might as well be drinking _something_.” 

“That was the plan,” I said, smile very weak.

“I’ve got you man,” Reiner said, stacking his last cup and clapping me on the back.” He went to the fridge and poured me a glass to match his, before we headed into the yard to check on Eren.

The house filled up slowly, and here is where things got very fuzzy. There are several possibilities. It’s possible I grabbed the wrong cup, as more and more identical drinks began to appear. It’s possible the fumes coming from the vats in the entry way alone were responsible. It’s possible Reiner, my hero, my inspiration, was a no-good traitor all along, who had never planned on letting me get off alcohol free. Either way, the next thing I really remembered was truth or dare. We were all in a big circle in what must have been Reiner’s room. Who did I play with? How did I get there? All good questions. The only person I knew was Mikasa, sitting across from me and going slowly in and out of focus. She was talking to me, and her face was a mask but her eyes were glinting. Truth or Dare? The truth was, I was secretly dating Jean Kirstein. It would have to be dare. And suddenly we were in the bathroom, and she was rummaging in her bag, and I was laughing because I couldn’t remember why this had seemed like such a bad idea this morning. She turned away while I did the thing I swore to her I would not do. 

“How do you feel?”

“Itchy.”

“No, you feel powerful.”

“I feel powerful.”

“That’s what I like to hear.”

Mikasa got a text from Eren. She was talking fast, too fast for me to really catch as she left the bathroom. I was following her downstairs, and then I was stopping dead in the hallway, because my boyfriend, _my boyfriend_ , was standing dead ahead, looking like a _really_ good dream. He was wearing tight leather. He was sporting dark, slicked back hair. He was Danny from Grease. And he was mine.

 

_Jean_

 

It was literal torture to keep stopping Armin’s advances as we moved around the party. I was completely lost. How did this happen? What was I supposed to do now? I should make it clear, I had made decisions without Armin before. Sixteen years full of pure Jean logic had at least kept me alive, if not exactly thriving. But I’d gotten used to being part of a two-person team where, to use an analogy I was growing fond of, I was more the feet than the brains of the operation. One thing was incredibly clear. I had to stay away from Armin, for his own good. Which was difficult when he was following me from room to room, drawing too many looks from the less intoxicated.

“Jean! Where are you going? Why don’t you have a drink? Can I get you a drink?” He had cornered me in the kitchen, where a large group of people were failing horribly at body shots. I was so worried about what they would think, the thought of doing a body shot off Armin didn’t even occur to me.

“There’s so many drinks right here!” said Armin, gesturing wildly around the kitchen. “I’ll get you the good stuff, you deserve the good stuff.” He tried to reach past me to the fridge, but I grabbed his wrist and leaned in as far as I dared.

“Armin! Go hang out with Eren or something! Do you understand? Am I getting through?”

“What?” he said, looking blank. I was suddenly angry. I was supposed to be the one who screwed things up, Armin was supposed to be the one who set things right, who got us back on schedule, who fixed the blender. How could he do this? I threw his wrist down.

“Stay away from me!” I’d said it too loud. I looked around expecting stares, but luckily everyone was too busy cheering as Ymir took a perfectly executed body shot off Historia. “Hey, sorry,” I said, turning back to Armin, already half forming a plan to get him out of here, or at least remind him why we couldn’t be ourselves right now. He was gone. Either he had suddenly needed to puke, or I’d upset him. Either way, I needed to find him right away.

The next room was empty, as well as the downstairs bathroom. How had he moved so fast? It was ridiculous that I’d just spend a half hour trying to get away from him, and now that I needed him he was nowhere. I leaned against the cool bathroom wall, head pounding along to the music, and took a deep breath before resuming my search. When I had searched every room upstairs (with some disturbing findings in like three of the master bedrooms) I burst back downstairs and into the living room, ready to look for Armin outside, where I was sure he was sick or upset or both. I froze in the doorway.  He was squeezed onto the couch between Bertholdt and Eren, who had an arm around him. Armin was tucked into his side, nose touching his fake blood stained sweater, a dopey sort of smile on his face. He looked fine. He looked happy. He looked like it had taken him about two seconds to forget I’d existed after I’d told him to leave me alone. My heart burned. Everything about this was wrong. We should have come here together. We should have both been drunk by now. I should have been doing shots off him in the kitchen instead of shouting at him. _We should have come here together._ I was so jealous, so frustrated, that I barely noticed someone was calling my name until they were basically saying it in my ear. Before I could turn around, Reiner had appeared like a god of chaos at my side, grinning ear to ear and holding two glasses of punch.

“You look upset,” he said, still grinning.

“I’m not,” I said, trying and failing to erase my murder face. Reiner didn’t buy it, which was fair.

“Sure. Listen, enjoy yourself, or I’ll kick your ass. This is a party, you’re supposed to be having fun,” he handed me one of the punch glasses, “drink with me.” I looked at the drink in my hand, then at Armin, then at everyone else laughing and dancing around like idiots. Having fun. _Yeah_. This _was_ a party. I _should_ be having fun.

“Cheers,” I said. I threw it back, and immediately understood just what was so dangerous about this punch. It tasted like fruit. Sweet, mild, innocent fruit. Cherries, and strawberries, and maybe a hint of peach. What it didn’t taste like, was alcohol. At all. I didn’t know what kind of sorcery Reiner had used on it, but this stuff could definitely kill someone. In fact, I was pretty sure it should actually be classed as poison. Even as this thought passed through my head, I felt a wave of gentle dizziness wafting over me. Fast acting poison, would be a more accurate term. I noticed that despite his order to drink with him, Reiner hadn’t touched his glass.

“You know what? Drink this one too. You look like you need it.” He clapped me on the back, handed me the second drink, and disappeared back into the crowd. I shouldn’t. I knew I shouldn’t. If I kept drinking, I might not just fail to spend any time with Armin, I might do something really stupid. Logic and emotion were battling inside me, and I’ll tell you, logic almost won. But after all, I was Jean ‘feet of the operation’ Kirstein. I drained the glass.

            I lost track of the party for a while after that. I didn’t have any more punch, but I’m pretty sure I lost a round of beer pong, and to this day I have vague memories of Jaeger, the person and the letter ä alcohol at the same time, a terrible combination if ever there was one. I probably would have spent the night passed out on the stairs if I hadn’t tripped going down them on my way back from the bathroom. Someone sitting halfway down stood up suddenly, catching me midair and probably stopping me from breaking my neck.

“Jean! There you are! You okay?” Black hair. Kind eyes. Strong enough to hold me up. Freckles.

“Marco! Where have you been?” He might have answered me, but I was too busy waving to the girls he’d been talking too before I’d nearly killed myself. I recognized them from school, just barely.

“Jean? Pay attention.” Mina and Hannah stopped waving back, and I refocused.   

“Marco! Have you tried the punch? You have to try the punch,” I said, looking around for Reiner.

“He’s had six glasses,” Mina took a second from her conversation to inform me.

“What?” Marco looked fine. Eyes clear, legs sturdy, expression neutral. I gaped at him. “Immune,” I whispered, “Marco, you have to teach me. Teach me your ways.”

“Jean, shut the fuck up for one second,” he said, grabbing me by the front of my jacket in what at first I thought was one of those manly hugs you saw mostly in bro comedies. As I tried to reciprocate however, he whispered in my ear, low enough that even the girls sitting right beside us couldn’t hear.

“Your boyfriend is looking for you.”

_Oh._

I pulled back, looking wide eyed at Marco, suddenly horrified. That’s right. My boyfriend was at this party. _My boyfriend_. I couldn’t for the life of me remember why I wasn’t with him, why I hadn’t been with him to whole time. I had to find him, right that second.

“Where is he Marco?”

“He was in the basement when I talked to him.” Marco had barely finished his sentence before I was barreling the rest of the way down the stairs, bouncing off walls as I blundered through the house looking for the basement. I’d been in Reiner’s basement before, but it still took me about fifteen minutes to find it in a corner of the kitchen I swear I’d checked three times. When I finally made it, it took me two seconds to realize Armin wasn’t one of the kids splashing in any of the three inflatable children’s pools Reiner had set up in here. I knew I should leave, but before I could take a step I heard my name.

“Jean! You look fucking awful!” I looked down. The pool closest to me was full of people. I knew a few of them. Bald guy, right. Potato Girl. And was that Angry Bastard? Someone’s hand closed around my ankle, and before I could shout or kick, my legs had gone out from under me. I landed in the kiddie pool with a big splash and bigger pain in my ass, both of which I barely registered in the sudden confusion of being wet. I was drunk out of my mind, confused out of my mind, and in a small smelly pool with a half naked Eren Jaeger, which was actually the last place on earth I wanted to be. Everyone was laughing, someone was asking if I was ok, and I could feel my temporary hair color running. I couldn’t focus, so I leaned back and waited for death. Really deep thoughts were coming to me just then, like: _this sucks_ , and: _alcohol is so good but also so bad?_ And finally: _What Would Armin Do?_ I opened my eyes, saw Eren without his shirt on, and closed them again. What _would_ Armin do? The Armin I knew would have a plan. The Armin I knew did have a plan. I had forgotten it a few swigs of Jäger ago, but it came back to me now. The plan was to meet at Armin’s house. I opened my eyes once more, begrudgingly, to see Jaeger grinning at me like a fucking psychopath. It was lucky I was wasted, because I hated what I was about to do. I had no choice if I wanted to pull it off, and I had to pull it off if I ever wanted to find Armin. If anyone knew where he was, it was Eren.

“Hey,” I said, “where’s your boyfriend?” The grin on Eren’s face was disgusting.

“At home. Waiting for-” There was no universe in which I was going to let him finish that sentence.

“I meant your other one. Small. Blonde. Always around you. Like always,” I said. Drunk Jaeger took about ten seconds to process what I said. Then he laughed.

“Fuck off. I’ve barely seen him this week. Always studying…he’s so smart! God! He was so drunk tonight though! He might have gone home I think. Connie! Get me another drink!” he shouted suddenly, as Connie stood and swayed dangerously. My ideal answer was something like: ‘Fuck off, there is nothing and has been nothing and will be nothing between Armin and I now and Forever. But he went home I think.’ Still, that last bit was all the confirmation I needed. The plan was still on, and Armin was waiting for me at his house. I waited what felt like an hour but must have been five agonizing minutes pretending to be interested in the rest of the people in the upsettingly warm pool. I stood up and walked up the stairs, leaving a solid trail of puddles as I exited the house. Then I was running, because I couldn’t waste one second not being with Armin when I should have been with him the whole night. I still wasn’t so sure why I hadn’t been.

Honestly, it was almost a really scary Halloween, because I almost died of exhaustion four times on my hunt for Armin’s house. Sober Jean knew where it was, and kind of what it looked like in daylight. Drunk me ran an extra four blocks looking for it. When I finally recognized the weird plants Armin had put in the front garden, feeling drunk had been replaced with feeling like I’d swallowed something very angry, with ten legs. Still, I had won. I’d figured it out. I’d made it. Back to Armin. Back to Armin’s bedroom window. Which was very dark. And very empty. I didn’t understand; how could he not be here? I remembered, at the exact moment my stomach twitched, and I expelled a good deal of my drunkenness right there in Armin’s backyard. He was _wasted_. Probably way worse than I’d been at this point, and I’d been a selfish asshole who’d yelled at him, who’d left him alone like that. And Jaeger was an idiot who thought just because Armin wasn’t with him meant he must have gone home.

I took off back in the direction I had come, before Mr. Arlert could report some sick new Halloween prank where kids come and barf in your yard.

—

Stay with me now. I know this doesn’t seem like the place for a really poignant moment. Or anything involving feelings, really. The night had already ticked the alcohol, puke, yelling, and pain boxes. But right then, in the middle of that mess of a party. That’s when I knew. People say that right? There was a moment when they knew? Mine was when I pulled up half jogging, seventy percent dead in front of Reiner’s house, and saw Armin Arlert sitting alone on the porch. It had been packed when I left, which meant something to rival the chandelier incident had probably drawn them all inside. But there he was, right when I thought all hope was lost, looking as angelic as possible while dressed as Satan. For a moment, I actually considered that I’d passed away a few feet ago, and this was an angel’s representation of my still living boyfriend, come to take me to a better place.

“Jean!” he said when he spotted me. I climbed the stairs to the porch and stopped a good ten feet in front of him, mostly because if I took another step I might collapse.

“Hey, I found you,” I said.

“You found me! Where have you been?” he said. He sounded worried, but otherwise his voice was a normal Armin voice. Not at all like when he was corning me in the kitchen.

“Looking for you. Sort of. On and off. Are you ok?”

“I’m fine! Well, I threw up a little. I could think after that, and I knew I needed liquids, and I knew you were angry at me and I came out here for air, and then you ran right past, I thought you were going home! I waited just in case…I didn’t want to follow you if you didn’t want to talk. I hoped you’d…” he fell silent as I took those final steps forward and wrapped him in a hug. I didn’t care who was watching, even though I knew everyone was too interested in the stupid party.

“Jean, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened. I can’t even explain. You really wanted to enjoy the party, and it all turned out such a mess,” he said. I squeezed tight.

“Armin. I have never been happier. You know why? One: you’re here, and you’re ok. Two: I’m not running anymore.” I stopped myself from adding: and a few seconds ago I became sure we’re soul mates or something. I could feel him smiling into my shirt as he squeezed right back.

“Ok. What should we do now? Where did you go if you didn’t go home? Do you want to go back to my house? Or go back to the party?”

“Too many questions,” I said. At this point, I had been swimming, thrown up, and run both ways from Armin’s house. Sober hadn’t quite caught me, but it was definitely tapping on my shoulder. I didn’t want any more trouble. I wanted simple. I wanted Armin.

“Let’s find somewhere here. Alone.”

Armin grinned, and I was glad to see that his eyes really were clear, even if his smile was still a little dopey.

“If anyone asks where we’re going, I’ll tell them I’m taking you somewhere to throw up,” he said. This cemented my belief that he had his brain back, and a wave of relief passed through me. We were a team again.

It was just past two o’clock at this point, and the party was reaching its peak, which made it easy to slip through the mindless crowd. Everyone was too busy screaming the lyrics to _Every Time We Touch_ to notice us as we headed upstairs. I had no desire to join them, even if it was a really fucking good song.

“Let’s go in here,” said Armin, checking inside before holding the door open for me. We’d probably found the smallest room in the house. I assumed it was for guests, because while there was a small single bed it looked like its main function was storing things that wouldn’t fit in Reiner’s room. Old sports trophies, an overlarge stuffed monkey that looked like it’d been won at a fair. Even the bedspread was power rangers, no doubt another relic from younger years, as I was sure Reiner didn’t have any siblings. I knew being this alone with a bed present was suggestive, but I wasn’t sure I could do anything surrounded by Reiner’s childhood. Armin collapsed on the red ranger, and I followed him. Even on the cramped bed, with Armin cuddled up against me I was finally at peace. _This_ was how it was supposed to be. The sound of muffled music from downstairs beat on as Armin started to talk, and his conversation was the best song I had ever heard. Much better than Cascada. Romantic bullshit. He talked a little about getting to the party, but went off topic before he could explain how he’d gone from ‘don’t drink the punch’ to ‘wasted on the punch’. I didn’t mind. He talked about Eren’s refusal to accept fashionably late as a concept, and Halloweens past. The one where they all went as Scooby doo characters and Eren was the dog. The one he’d had to skip because he got the flu. The year after Mikasa hit puberty, and some guy tried to hit on her in her tomb raider costume, and she kicked his ass better than Lara Croft ever could. He paused.

“That reminds me. I have a Mikasa related confession to make,” he said.

“Did you make out with her or something on accident tonight?” I asked, grinning at my own joke while trying to make out the inscription on one of Reiner’s trophy’s on the dresser beside us. There was no answer, and when I looked back at Armin I saw the face he was making. “Holy shit, you didn’t did you?”

“No no no, of course not. Well, its not…I guess it’s actually more intimate, in a weird way. Oh! That’s a pun too!” I sat up a little to look at him properly.

“Armin, are you still drunk? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Well,” he started, “it’s so stupid really. I don’t do go to many parties. Mikasa thought it would help my confidence if my outfit was sexy.” I made a mental note to replace ‘thank god’ in my vocabulary with ‘thank Mikasa’.

“She came up with this?” I said, eyeing his costume. The makeup around his eyes was a little smudged, and the shirt had a big stain on the front. Didn’t matter. Still sexy. Armin blushed.

“Ha. Yeah. She’s also the reason I’m wearing lace underwear right now.” He laughed as if this was no big deal. A throwaway statement.

“You’re wearing what?” He put his hands over his face.  

“Lingerie! She said they would add something actually sinful to my costume. You know, people think she’s all silent justice, but you wouldn’t believe the evil she’s capable of sometimes. I refused for a long time, but then I was drunk…I don’t know. I can’t believe I even told you. Don’t make me say it again.” His hands were still clamped over his eyes, so tight I thought they might leave marks. I hadn’t heard much past lingerie. Except:  

“They’re Mikasa’s?” I said. I knew they were close, and the thought of Armin in any lace underwear was thrilling to say the least, but I didn’t want her popping up when I was trying to focus on more important matters. Like how my too tight leather pants were getting much tighter, and fast.  “No, no,” he said, finally taking his hands away from his face, “she’s never worn them, it’s this thing she does. Their dad, he’s not around, but he’s SUPER RICH. Like, LOADED. But, he only gives them extra money for food and clothes. So Mikasa buys the most expensive clothes she can when she’s extra mad at him. And apparently lingerie isn’t cheap. It’s weird I know, but it’s hard for them to act out when…I really shouldn’t get into it. It’s their business. Their dad is so…”

I’d stopped listening after ‘never worn them’. Something about Mikasa and her dad and underwear. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into it. There was something else I’d much rather get into. I’d said I couldn’t do anything surrounded by Reiner’s childhood, but _lace underwear_. I leaned down, feeling a little bad about shutting Armin up with way, then a little less bad as he sat up into the kiss. I was surprised when he bit my lower lip gently, and pushed his fingers into my hair. Before I could push back, those same fingers turned into fists, pulling hard. I jerked back instinctively.

“Sorry!” Armin gasped, his hands flying up like I was about to arrest him for turning me on. I didn’t trust my words to make sense. Instead I grabbed both of his hands, put them back in my hair, kissed him a little too roughly and prayed he got the message.

His hands were back in my hair, pulling, and I moved my left hand to his hip. The crop top made it easy to touch bare skin, and my hands roamed. It wasn’t much, but my fingers running up and down his sides still managed to pull soft, sweet noises from his lips when they weren’t occupied with mine. There was no suggestion about it now. I was incredibly hard, and I was sure Armin could tell. I froze as he pushed one knee tentatively between my legs, as I felt his smile on my neck. He’d called Mikasa evil a second ago, but this definitely his own personal brand of devil. The same one that shot me in the head during a team battle video game.

“These underwear. As long as I’m wearing them, you want to see?” he said, in a breathy whisper that made my skin crawl in a good way I hadn’t known existed. I didn’t trust myself to do more than nod, then watch in astonishment as he got up off the bed and stood facing me. For ten seconds I itched with the thought that he was making me wait, about to undo the zip and make all my wildest dreams come true. Forty seconds later I realized this was not the case.

“Armin?” I noticed his ears had gone red.

“I want you to see. I don’t know what I’ll look like though. I’ve never seen myself in these either.”

“You don’t have to.” I said.

Armin took a deep breath.

“No, I want to, really. You go first though.”

“I’m not wearing lace underwear,” I said, confused.

“I know! Just take something off! It’ll make me feel better,” he said, ears going even redder. I’m not proud of it, but in that moment I would have done just about anything to see him in Mikasa’s weird dad rage panties. I peeled off my t-shirt without thinking, throwing it somewhere behind the bed. Every second Armin was still wearing clothes was killing me, and he seemed to be set on taking his time. In fact, he’d stopped doing anything, even fidgeting. Instead he was staring. At what? At _me_? His eyes met mine.

“Don’t you work at an ice cream parlor? That’s so unfair!”

“What’s unfair?”

“What’s unfair?” he repeated, in a tone of disbelief that my still halfway tipsy brain could not comprehend. “You…fuck it.” And faster than I would have believed possible, he unbuttoned and stepped out of his shorts.

He looked like the way it felt to miss a step on your way down the stairs. It wasn’t just the fact that I could see almost everything through the sheer panties, even in the low moonlight coming from the window. It was the way the red was so bright against his pale skin. It was the way the thin fabric hugged his hips perfectly, like the wrapping on a present.

“Come here,” I said. His ears were still a little red, but he walked forward, and I froze again as he crawled onto my lap, his soft lips going to my neck. I couldn’t believe this was happening. We’d hardly done more than kiss since we’d been together. Was this too fast? Idiot Jean. I wanted this more than anything.

“What was that?” Armin said, pulling away to look at me. Either he was reading my mind again, or I had accidentally whispered what I’d been thinking since I first saw him in those shorts. I fought a tidal wave of embarrassment even Reiner’s punch couldn’t cure to get the words out.

“I want you.” Armin’s eyes were very wide.

“That’s nice to hear.”

“What do you think?” I asked. He pursed his lips, as if he were really considering his answer. I prepared myself for a strong no. Definitely a no; the night had already taken too good a turn to be true.

“I think you should be in your underwear too.”

I didn’t want Armin off my lap, a desire which battled furiously with my desire to not be wearing pants. I extracted myself from under him and stood. With my hands on the top button of my too tight bottoms, I suddenly understood Armin’s embarrassment. Undressing with someone watching wasn’t something I’d previously encountered. I fumbled, my fingers slipping off the next button twice. Then, horror as I realized my too tight bottoms were really _too tight_. I couldn’t get them back over my thighs. I heard Armin laugh.

“Don’t!” I said, to embarrassed to look up as I continued to struggle. The next thing I knew however, he’d leaned forward and grabbed me by the belt loops that were now sitting bunched around mid thigh. I fell like half a slug on top of him, and right away his hands were in my hair again. He pulled me down to him, slipped his tongue in my mouth so I immediately imagined what it would feel like on my cock. This was really happening. I shifted, and suddenly we were perfectly aligned, pressing together. Armin gasped. It was a funny gasp. It started out high and longing, but turned strangled as light flooded the room. I blinked, torn from the moment, deposited unpleasantly into a reality were the bedroom door was wide open. Where the last person I wanted to see right now was standing. I rolled off Armin as quickly as possibly.

What was going on, what sick trick of fate brought him here I didn’t know, but I was suddenly facing a dilemma. On the one hand, I wanted to frame the look on Jaeger’s face, or maybe bottle it, so I could take it out and enjoy it in tiny sips for the rest of my life. On the other, I also totally wanted to die and never enjoy anything ever again. He’d found me half naked, kind of sweaty, and pinning his best friend. His best friend in lace underwear. I heard Mikasa’s voice from somewhere, shouting: _I knew it_. Then Eren was gone. He slammed the door, plunging us into darkness. The music from downstairs had died down. I could hear more voices out on the landing. I turned to Armin not knowing what I was going to say, but he saved me the trouble. He was already up, zipping his shorts back up, halfway out the door. He didn’t look back once as he disappeared into the hall, leaving me alone in the darkened room.

**Author's Note:**

> I plan to update every two weeks at the latest, but can make no promises as a university student trying desperately to make money and pass classes. That being said, I will absolutely write this to completion, it’s been much too long coming. Thanks for reading!


End file.
